summary of into the water by paula hawkins

She’s nominally in charge of a teenage niece she doesn’t know and the house where the events that drove her and her sister apart took place. Jules Abbott has returned to her home town following the apparent suicide of her estranged sister. After that initial dramatic incident, the narrative proper begins. It’s not clear whether it’s a historic or a contemporary event, but as first pages go, it’s arresting.

The opening of Into the Water is shocking: a woman bound and drowned at the hands of hostile men. Her debut thriller The Girl on the Train has sold a staggering 20m copies worldwide and been made into a film starring Emily Blunt as the dysfunctional protagonist. That’s the challenge Hawkins faces with Into the Water. To come up with a second, a third, a fourth – that’s a lot harder. To come up with one high-concept thriller with a genuine “OMG” moment is a big ask. We readers journey hopefully, willing that moment to arrive. There must be a sudden twist in the direction of travel, taking us to an entirely unexpected destination. Among the creeps with possible motives are Patrick Townsend, a retired cop whose wife died years earlier at the Drowning Pool Patrick’s son, Sean, who has inherited his old man’s profession and perhaps predilections and Mark Henderson, a handsome high-school teacher who takes Lolita a little too literally.These books need to deliver at least one shocking moment when the reader realises that they have been looking at the picture the wrong way up.

Like Girl on the Train, this is a story disturbingly rife with misogyny and violence against women. Left behind is Nel’s hostile 15-year-old daughter, Lena, whose best friend, Katie Whittaker, committed suicide at the same place just weeks earlier. Did Nel, a photographer and writer who was investigating the Drowning Pool’s many female victims (including 17th-century “witches”), jump or slip from the cliff above? Was she pushed? The novel begins with Jules (Julia) Abbott being summoned back to Beckford after her estranged sister, Nel, is found dead in the “Drowning Pool,” as the infamous bend in the town’s river is called.

The various plot currents eventually converge, and when they do Into the Water takes off with a rush.

Summary of into the water by paula hawkins