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1. Into the water LCCN 2017003237 Type of material Book Personal name Hawkins, Paula, author. Main title Into the water / Paula Hawkins. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. Description 388 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780735211209 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PR6108.A963 I58 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Morning Edition, NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/04/28/525926201/paula-hawkins-prepares-to-dive-into-the-water

  < Paula Hawkins Prepares To Dive 'Into The Water' April 28, 20175:04 AM ET 5:19 Download Facebook Twitter Google+ Email DAVID GREENE, HOST: Paula Hawkins' 2015 book "The Girl On The Train" was this massive bestseller, a domestic thriller with a boozy unstable narrator. Before "Girl On The Train," Hawkins had written a string of unsuccessful romantic comedies under a pen name. Now, she's one of the highest-paid authors in the world. So how do you follow up such a smash success? Well, Hawkins is about to publish a new book titled "Into The Water" about a small English town with a sinister history of drowned women. NPR's Petra Mayer caught up with the author in London. PETRA MAYER, BYLINE: Paula Hawkins says the huge success of "The Girl On The Train" hasn't really changed her but it hasn't been easy, either. She's happiest when she's just left alone to write. And alone time can be scarce when you're a number one bestseller. PAULA HAWKINS: I write best when I can immerse myself in a book and in the characters. Having to drop everything to run off and talk about your old characters, it's really quite difficult for me. MAYER: Those interruptions meant that writing her new book took longer than she'd hoped but there was one thing that was helpful - a walk by the water. We're strolling through Victoria Park in East London. It's a bright, blustery day. And as we wander by the rows of houseboats on Regent's Canal, it feels like we're a million miles away from the dark worlds Hawkins creates. HAWKINS: It's a lovely walk down by the canal. And walking is my way of sorting through things. So if I've got a problem, I often go for a walk - a writing problem, I mean. MAYER: There are no lovely walks by calm currents in "Into The Water." It's set in the fictional English town of Beckford, where troublesome women have an unfortunate tendency to end up in what the locals call the drowning pool. The book begins with one of those drowned women, whose death draws her sister back to Beckford after decades away. Everyone has a relationship to the water, Hawkins says. She herself has happy memories of swimming during beach vacations in Zimbabwe, where she grew up. But sometimes that water got rough. HAWKINS: There were some frightening moments, as well. And I think for some people, a frightening moment can turn into a phobia. And this is what I've sort of looked at in this book. MAYER: In "Into The Water," people look at the river and they see all kinds of different things. One character says it's infected by the blood and bile of persecuted women. HAWKINS: Indeed, that's the thing about water if you live near water. It's ever changing, isn't it? It's never quite the same. I remember walking along, you know, a beautiful stream thinking about what a lovely place this would to be go for a swim. And we came around the corner and there was a dead sheep washed up a bit. And so yes, it can conceal, can't it? You don't know what lies beneath. And that's a big theme of "Into The Water." MAYER: So would you say you're the sort of person that sees the skull beneath the skin? HAWKINS: Definitely. I am something of a pessimist, so I'm - but I think I'm just fascinated by working out, you know, how people react in extreme circumstances, how people react to tragedy or adversity. MAYER: Her previous book, "The Girl On The Train," followed a woman mired in adversity, an alcoholic who'd lost everything - job, marriage, home, and big chunks of her memory. She began to make up dangerous stories about the people she saw every day through the train windows as she pretended to commute to her long-gone job. That story was inspired by Hawkins' daily travels. But one of the ways you can follow up a big success is to do something different. She says her new book comes from somewhere quite different, somewhere not as rooted in her own life. HAWKINS: I was thinking about siblings, family relationships, the way in which we tell stories about our lives, how you sometimes - you can remember something from childhood and then you'll have a conversation with other members of your family and they'll remember that event in a completely different way. But I was wondering about what happens if the thing that you're misremembering is absolutely fundamental to you? What would that do to you when you discover it later? MAYER: There are some threads that seem to run through both books, in particular that idea that what we remember or even what we see in front of us is not what's true. HAWKINS: There are characters in "Into The Water" who present themselves as upstanding paragons of community. And we know from experience that people who present themselves as paragons of virtue are often not. MAYER: With any new book, there's always pressure. Will readers bite? Will critics bite harder? That pressure's doubled when you're trying to avoid the dreaded sophomore slump. And so far, critical response to "Into The Water" has been mixed. JANET MASLIN: If she had just done "The Girl On The Train 2," I don't think a lot of people would have blamed her for replicating it. MAYER: That's Janet Maslin, a contributing critic at The New York Times. MASLIN: I really liked what she did with "The Girl On The Train" and I'm sorry to say that I would have preferred something much more like that. MAYER: But that's part of being an author. You may love your book. You may labor over it for years but once it goes out into the world, Hawkins says, you have to let it go. HAWKINS: It is terrifying. And yeah, it's almost like stepping off a cliff, isn't it? The book is out there. I can't change anything now. The reviewers have it. They will react how they react. Readers will react how they react. There's nothing you can do now, so just take deep breaths. MAYER: And perhaps take a calming walk by the water. Petra Mayer, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF EPIC45'S "WINTERBIRDS")

• Wikipedia -

  Paula Hawkins (author)
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  This article is about the British author. For the American politician, see Paula Hawkins.
  Paula Hawkins
  Paula Hawkins Göteborg Book Fair 2015.jpg
  Hawkins at Gothenburg Book Fair in 2015
  Born 26 August 1972 (age 44)
  Harare, Zimbabwe
  Pen name

  Amy Silver

  Occupation Novelist, journalist
  Nationality British
  Alma mater Keble College, Oxford
  Notable works

  The Girl on the Train
  Into the Water

  Website
  paulahawkinsbooks.com

  Paula Hawkins (born 26 August 1972) is a British author, best known for her best-selling psychological thriller novel The Girl on the Train (2015), which deals with themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse.[1][2] The novel was adapted into a film starring Emily Blunt in 2016.[3] Hawkins' second novel, Into the Water, was released in 2017.[4]

  Contents

  1 Life and career
  2 Bibliography
  3 References
  4 External links

  Life and career

  Hawkins was born and raised in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). Her father was an economics professor and financial journalist. Before moving to London in 1989[5] at the age of 17, Hawkins attended Arundel School, Harare, Zimbabwe then studied for her A-Levels at Collingham College, an independent college in Kensington, West London. Hawkins read philosophy, politics and economics at Keble College, University of Oxford.[6] She worked as a journalist for The Times, reporting on business. She then worked for a number of publications on a freelance basis, and wrote a financial advice book for women, The Money Goddess.[2]

  Around 2009, Hawkins began to write romantic comedy fiction under the name Amy Silver, writing four novels including Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista. She did not achieve any commercial breakthrough until she challenged herself to write a darker, more serious story. Her best-selling novel The Girl on the Train (2015), was a complex thriller, with themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse.[2] The novel took her six months, writing full-time, to complete, at a time when she was in a difficult financial situation and had to borrow from her father to be able to complete it. The novel was adapted into a film in 2016.[1] She lives in South London.
  Bibliography

  Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School (2001) (Amy Silver) (with co-author Grace Llewellyn) (ISBN 9780471349600)[7]
  Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (2009) (Amy Silver) (ISBN 9780099543558)[8]
  All I Want for Christmas (2010) (Amy Silver) (ISBN 9780099553229)[9]

  One Minute to Midnight (2011) (Amy Silver) (ISBN 9780099564638)[10]

  The Reunion (2013) (Amy Silver) (ISBN 9780099574491)[11]
  The Girl on the Train (2015) (Paula Hawkins) (ISBN 9781594634024)[12]
  Into the Water (2017) (Paula Hawkins) (ISBN 9780735211209)

• Amazon -

  Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction.

  Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since. Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train, has been published in over forty languages, has been a No.1 bestseller around the world and is now a major motion picture starring Emily Blunt. Into the Water is her second thriller.

• Financial Review - http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/books/author-paula-hawkins-was-stunned-by-her-first-success-will-it-happen-again-20170514-gw4ref

  May 19 2017 at 11:00 PM Updated May 19 2017 at 11:00 PM

  Print

  Author Paula Hawkins was stunned by her first success; will it happen again?

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  Paula Hawkins, author of the runaway hit thriller The Girl on the Train, is in a state of nerves before the ...
  Paula Hawkins, author of the runaway hit thriller The Girl on the Train, is in a state of nerves before the release of her next novel, Into The Water. Kate Neil
  by Bryony Gordon

  Into the Water is Paula Hawkins' difficult second novel, except that actually it's her sixth. Before her 2015 thriller The Girl on the Train sold more than 20 million copies and was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster, Hawkins, then a freelance business journalist, wrote a series of romantic comedies under the pen name of Amy Silver (there were also a couple of non-fiction books providing financial advice to women and parents).

  Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista and All I Want For Christmas did not set the publishing world alight and Hawkins was on the verge of giving up on novels when she decided to turn to the altogether darker subject of alcoholism and domestic violence and, buoyed by a loan from her father, an academic and journalist, gave it one last shot. The gamble paid off, and last year Hawkins leapfrogged George R.R. Martin and Dan Brown to claim a place in the Forbes list of the world's highest paid authors, with annual earnings of $US10 million.

  I meet Hawkins in a quiet bar near her home in central London, a week or so before publication of Into the Water, and immediately get the impression that despite the riches, she might actually prefer to be slumming it as Amy Silver, or at least as a financial hack at a newspaper. "I miss that buzz when something exciting happens in a newsroom," she says. "And obviously, journalists are fun people, so I miss that, too."

  She looks shell-shocked by all that has happened over the past couple of years, as if she had gone out with a metal detector looking for bits and bobs and stumbled on a treasure chest. Hawkins is politely quiet and clearly uncomfortable with the process of having to publicise a book. "I think that like most novelists I'm happiest just sitting at my desk making up stories. It's not a natural thing to come out and start talking about yourself. I don't even find talking about the work that easy."
  Justin Theroux and Emily Blunt in a scene from the film version of Paula Hawkins' thriller The Girl on the Train.
  Justin Theroux and Emily Blunt in a scene from the film version of Paula Hawkins' thriller The Girl on the Train. AP
  Self-effacing celebrity author

  Despite the success of The Girl on the Train, she is nervous about the release of the follow-up, a dense thriller set in a fictional northern town in Britain told from the point of view of 11 different characters. "People talk about books all the time and you expect them to do great things and then they sink. So this is, you know, the nerve-racking time. The weeks before."

  We talk a bit about the experience for her of becoming a novelist mentioned in lists alongside J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. "It's overwhelming, fantastic, discombobulating, bewildering, all these things. I'm not particularly extrovert. I don't like to be the centre of attention. It is daunting and it makes you feel very vulnerable. One shouldn't complain because one has done very well out of it, but at the same time one does."

  She smiles. She has experienced first-hand the strange desire of people to pick apart the successful. "The thing is, I realised I used to do that to people all the time!" She looks aghast. "Not publicly, but it irritates you when something becomes ubiquitous, doesn't it? It's natural. But actually, to the person who wrote it, it doesn't make it any less hurtful. You have got to develop a thick skin."
  'Dark, gothic, wild atmosphere'
  Paula Hawkins found huge success with The Girl on the Train but it was not her first novel. She tried her hand – ...
  Paula Hawkins found huge success with The Girl on the Train but it was not her first novel. She tried her hand – unsuccessfully – at romantic comedies before switching to darker themes. The New York Times

  Hawkins claims that not much has changed in her life. "I was pretty broke and I am no longer. I bought a nice flat, but that's the major change really. I travel more, but I don't feel much different. I still see the same people."

  When did she know that The Girl on the Train was going to be big? "Well nobody expects this, nobody expects things to take off in quite the way that [The Girl on the Train] did. I thought that it felt like a quiet book actually. I was so surprised that the Americans liked it because I just thought of it as a depressing short little English book about a drunk."

  Into the Water has much in common with its predecessor, featuring, as it does, a succession of flawed women and thoroughly unlikeable men – in this case, rapists, paedophiles and murderers. The book begins with the death of Nel Abbott, who has apparently jumped to her death into the "Drowning Pool", a local suicide spot that she had long been convinced was actually something more sinister, "a place to get rid of troublesome women". There are moody daughters, mysterious sisters, grieving parents, and enough corrupt coppers to fill an episode of Line of Duty.

  "I wanted to do something about family and community and I wanted to give it that feeling you get in a small town where everybody knows each other. I've never lived in one before." Hawkins grew up in Zimbabwe and moved to London when she was 17, before studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, but has always "wondered if living somewhere where everyone knows each other's business actually makes you more secretive, like you feel you have to hide more".
  Into the Water, Paula Hawkins' new thriller, is set in north-west England and explores the gothic side of ...
  Into the Water, Paula Hawkins' new thriller, is set in north-west England and explores the gothic side of small-town life. Supplied

  She says she set the new book in a fictional Northumberland town because "I wanted to create this kind of dark, gothic, wild atmosphere, and there aren't many places like that". There is even a hint of the supernatural about it. "Witch-hunting wasn't a big thing in England but that's one of the parts of the country where it happened, and I thought it just felt right."
  'Isn't everyone insecure?'

  Hawkins is very, very good at creating strong but ultimately flawed women, modern-day witches. Rachel, the anti-heroine of The Girl on the Train, was an alcoholic painted so painfully brilliantly that her story was at times hard to read. "I think that Rachel, for a lot of us, she's where we might have gone, where we've all seen ourselves. Given the right circumstances: job loss, marriage breakdown, I could have slid off the edge just like she did.

  "It's alcoholism how I think middle-class women experience it, how a lot of women experience it, a lot of people. Pretty much everyone in my books is a little bit troubled, but those are the things that are interesting, aren't they? Pulling apart people whose lives are going a bit wrong and finding out why and getting into the psychology of it, and watching them work through it. That's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in."
  Paula Hawkins insists the enormous success of The Girl on the Train has not fundamentally changed her life.
  Paula Hawkins insists the enormous success of The Girl on the Train has not fundamentally changed her life. Supplied

  Hawkins is prepared for the inevitable questions about how much of herself is in the characters. "I think in this book there aren't any [characters] that are like me," she says. "There are bits of Jules' insecurity and weirdness I suppose." Jules is Nel Abbott's awkward younger sister.

  Does Hawkins really feel insecure and weird? "Sometimes," she says. "Definitely insecure." Why? "Isn't everyone insecure?" What are you insecure about? "So many things," she says, reluctant to elaborate. "But no, there isn't one character who is me. Everyone thinks I'm Rachel, falling down drunk, but I'm really not." Do you drink? "Yeah!" she says with a smile.
  'Nothing has ever happened to me'

  Now 44, Hawkins insists she's "had a boringly happy existence. I don't have some terrible dark tragic past, and perhaps that's why I'm attracted to these things. I shouldn't say this, but nothing has ever happened to me. So I read stories in the newspaper about people's lives going horribly wrong and I'm fascinated and I want to pick apart why it happened. How did things go so wrong for these people who were bobbing along with their normal, boring lives? I think most of us are drawn to those sorts of stories."

  Even her childhood in Harare seems to have lacked drama. "It's a strange place. Everything is falling apart there, but there's a sort of merry chaos about it. It's not dangerous or anything, but I don't go where things are really bad."

  I try a different tack. As a former hack, what question would she really like a journalist to ask her? "I don't really have a burning desire to talk about anything really!"

  What about the business world? "No, I most certainly wouldn't. I'd like to talk about you if that's okay?" This is her skill, I think, her ability to quietly unpick the people around her.

  She writes at home. "I have a little desk in my little atrium in my flat. I sit down and write all morning and maybe into mid-afternoon, and by that point I'm all burned out by writing so I do other stuff." Such as? "I'm so dull. I see friends, go out to dinner, walk, read, travel. I don't have any quirky hobbies. I have no pets." Does she have a …?

  "I have a partner, yes, who I'm not talking about." She starts to laugh, knowing exactly how journalists work. Has she been together with her partner for a long time? "Two years," she says succinctly. Is your partner a …? "Lawyer," is her response. I was actually going to ask if her partner was a man or a woman, though only because of her caginess.

  "Man. Look, my life feels quite stable and that's very important when your life has been as weird as mine has for the last couple of years."

  But Hawkins is mostly grateful for the success she has experienced. "It's such a great privilege and so few of us can actually live off it. I would have killed to do this when I was eight; creative writing was my thing. But I was quite practical so I never really thought of 'author' as a career plan."

  The memory of the Amy Silver books is still fresh in her mind.

  "It takes the experience of utter failure to know that this is not a given. I moan about having two weeks of press, but most authors dream of having two weeks of press. To have national newspapers talk to you is a privilege. My life is writing books and making up stories." She looks at me almost in disbelief. "And what a nice life that is."

  Into the Water by Paula Hawkins, Doubleday, distributed here by Penguin, $32.99

  Read more: http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/books/author-paula-hawkins-was-stunned-by-her-first-success-will-it-happen-again-20170514-gw4ref#ixzz4i5pZ4uqF
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• Paula Hawkins Home Page - http://paulahawkinsbooks.com/

  PAULA HAWKINS worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. She is the author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water. An international #1 bestseller, The Girl on the Train was published in 50 countries and over 40 languages. It has sold over 18 million copies worldwide and has been adapted into a major motion picture. Hawkins was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in London.

• Doubleday Canada - http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/imprints/doubleday-canada/blog/qa-paula-hawkins-author-girl-train

  Q&A with Paula Hawkins, Author of The Girl on the Train
  Related Books
  December 12, 2014
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  1. The Girl On The Train is a masterfully written thriller – have you always been a fan of the genre?

  I developed a taste for crime as a teenager with Agatha Christie, but I think it was Donna Tartt’s The Secret History which really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the psychological thriller. I read a lot of crime fiction now: I particularly love Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series which, like Tartt’s work, blend cracking plots with beautiful writing and exceptionally crafted characters. I am also a big fan of Tana French’s police procedurals, as well as writers such as Harriet Lane, Megan Abbott and Gillian Flynn.
  2. The main characters are all such distinct personalities – were they based on anyone you know?

  Like a lot of authors, I’m a bit of a magpie, and I borrow bits of people’s personalities and put them into characters. None of my characters is based on any one person, but they may share traits with people I’ve met.
  3. You’ve been a journalist for many years – has the urge to write a work of fiction been kicking around for a while?

  I loved creative writing as a child, and I’ve actually been writing fiction on and off ever since– I just didn’t used to show it to anyone! I have dozens of unfinished novels on stored away on hard drives – some might just be a few pages, some are tens of thousands of words long. I may even return to some of them one day.
  4. A real strength of The Girl On The Train is the realistic depiction of alcoholism. What kind of research did you do to create such a compelling portrait of the disease?

  We live in a booze-soaked culture in the UK, so you don’t have to go far to experience the havoc that heavy drinking can wreak. Nor do you always find alcohol dependence in the most obvious of places: there are plenty of high-functioning, successful people who teeter on the brink of the abyss into which Rachel has slipped.

  I did some reading on black outs induced by drinking – why they occur in some people and not others and what exactly is happening in the brain when they do occur is not fully understood. I know anecdotally that memory loss is often something which afflicts heavy drinkers, but the interesting thing is that it doesn’t necessarily happen in a uniform or predicable way. In some instances, a drinker’s recall of experience is recoverable, in others, it seems that no memory has been formed at all.
  5. A lot of readers have described the book “as exciting as Gone Girl” – how do you feel about those comparisons?

  I am a huge fan of Gone Girl. I thought it was an extraordinary book and in Amy I think Flynn created a character that people will be talking about for years, so to be mentioned in the same breath as that book is a huge compliment as far as I’m concerned. I can see why people draw comparisons, but I also think that The Girl on the Train is a very different book. While Gone Girl deals with the disintegration of a marriage, in The Girl on the Train we have already passed that point: Rachel’s marriage is gone, she has no job, no home, she has lost everything. Most importantly, she’s lost control – whereas Flynn’s protagonist is very much in the driving seat.

Into the Water
264.12 (Mar. 20, 2017): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Into the Water

Paula Hawkins. Riverhead, $28 (400p)

ISBN 978-0-7352-1120-9

Jules Abbott, the heroine of bestseller Hawkins's twisty second psychological thriller, vowed never to return to the sleepy English town of Beckford after an incident when she was a teenager drove a wedge between her and her older sister, Nel. But now Nel, a writer and photographer, is the latest in a long string of women found dead in a part of the local river known as the Drowning Pool. As Nel put it, "Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women." Before Nel's death, the best friend of her surly 15-yearold daughter, Lena, drowned herself, an act that had a profound effect on both Nel and Lena. Beckford history is dripping with women who've thrown themselves--or been pushed?--off the cliffs into the Drowning Pool, and everyone--from the police detective, plagued by his own demons, working the case to the new cop in town with something to prove--knows mote than they're letting on. Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) may be juggling a few too many story lines for comfort, but the payoff packs a satisfying punch. Author tour. Agent: Lizzy Kremer, David Higham Associates (U.K.). (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Into the Water." Publishers Weekly, 20 Mar. 2017, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487601751&it=r&asid=91285330caa7e5b5b8b984e1af3cb593. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A487601751
Into the Water
Annie Bostrom
113.14 (Mar. 15, 2017): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm

Into the Water.

By Paula Hawkins.

May 2017. 400p. Riverhead, $28 (9780735211209).

Nel Abbott obsessed over the drowning pool, a spot in the river behind her family's Beckford, England, home where several women had lost their lives, as far back as her estranged sister, Jules, can remember. Nel was writing the dead women's stories, in fact, before her own body was discovered in the pool, prompting Jules' return to Beckford to care for Nel's prickly teenage daughter, Lena. As Nel's apparent suicide is investigated, past events surface--and some of them are barely past. Just months ago, Lena's best friend walked into the river with a weighted backpack, and the girl's grieving family blames Nel for glorifying the drowned women. Needless to say, nothing is quite as it appears, but those who know more have reasons to keep quiet. In her second thriller, Hawkins {The Girl on the Train, 2015) returns to the rotating-narration style of her breakout debut, giving voice to an even broader cast this time, and readers will see shades of Girl's Rachel in Jules. Hawkins' creepy small-town setting is a draw, too. As a called-in investigator notes of Beckford, "it seems like whichever way you turn, in whatever direction you go, somehow you always end up back at the river."--Annie Bostrom

HIGH DEMAND BACKSTGRY: Have you M heard of The Girl on the Train? Sure you have-along with everyone else. Order by the ton.

YA: Characters their own age (who've gotten up to more than a bit of trouble) will be an immediate draw for teens. AB.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Into the Water." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490998440&it=r&asid=24218a4e40c59c16c20ac3a510a0f4ab. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A490998440
Hawkins, Paula: INTO THE WATER
(Mar. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Hawkins, Paula INTO THE WATER Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $28.00 5, 2 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1120-9

Women in a small British town have been drowning since 1679. "No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day." So sayeth the town psychic in Hawkins' (The Girl on the Train, 2015) follow-up to her smash-hit debut. Unfortunately, there's nothing here to match the sharp characterization of the alcoholic commuter at the center of that story. Here the central character--Danielle Abbott, an award-winning writer and photographer who's also the single mother of a teenager--has already died. At the time of her watery demise, she was working on a coffee-table book about the spot the people of Beckford call the Drowning Pool, once her "place of ecstasy," where she learned to swim, now her grave. She left behind a pile of typewritten pages and a daughter whose best friend also drowned just a few months ago. Danielle's estranged sister, Jules, returns to town to identify the body, relive the distressing past that led her to flee this creepy place, and try to deal with her snotty, grieving niece, Lena. Many of the neighbor families are also down a member via the pool, and even after you've managed to untangle all the willfully misleading information, half-baked subplots, and myriad characters, you're going to have a tough time keeping it straight. The spunkiest voice belongs to a somewhat tangential policewoman who probably should have been the narrator. "Seriously," she comments, "how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It's like Midsomer Murders, only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head." Let's call it sophomore slump and hope for better things.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hawkins, Paula: INTO THE WATER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911854&it=r&asid=1b07ecb987fe3da7f569802050a4a0e9. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911854
Stay Away From the River
Janet Maslin
(Apr. 25, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC2(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com

INTO THE WATERBy Paula Hawkins386 pages. Riverhead Books. $28.

Paula Hawkins has followed up ''The Girl on the Train,'' her 2015 monster hit, with another bookload of skulduggery. And rather than mimic her proven formula for success, she has tried something very different. There you have it: All the good news about her new one, ''Into the Water.''

If ''The Girl on the Train'' seemed overplotted and confusing to some readers, it is a model of clarity next to this latest effort. ''Into the Water'' is set in the rural British town of Beckford, an extremely unhealthy habitat for women. Beckford has cliffs, a bridge, a river and a drowning pool. It also has a long history of women falling off, stepping into or otherwise dying via any of the above.

Libby, murdered by men in the prologue, turns out to be an accused witch from the 17th century. But Hawkins starts with just the spookiness, withholding the date and the full, pointless story for a long time.

The rest of the novel takes place over the course of one month, August 2015. Hawkins plagues little Beckford with contemporary watery deaths, grieving about other watery deaths and the discovery of a manuscript about the town's history of watery deaths. Her goal may be to build suspense, but all she achieves is confusion. ''Into the Water'' is jam-packed with minor characters and stories that go nowhere.

What happened to the Paula Hawkins who structured ''The Girl on the Train'' so ingeniously? That book, and the ensuing movie starring Emily Blunt, used a cleverly devised unreliable narrator, focused on interrelated couples, revealed all its characters to be untrustworthy and came close to bursting at its seams. But that story radiated sheer serenity compared with the three-ring circus that ''Into the Water'' becomes.

The new one properly begins in 2015 with the death of Nel Abbott. (Make a chart. A big one.) Nel was the mother of 15-year-old Lena, whose best friend, Katie Whittaker, died in the water only a few weeks earlier. Nel has a chilly estranged sister, Julia (known as Jules), who's been gone so long she doesn't know her niece Lena, but now comes back to town to impose her presence on the orphaned girl. Lena has no idea who her father was. But he must have been a man and therefore likely a terrible monster. Every man in ''Into the Water'' has the potential to be one.

Louise Whittaker, Katie's mother, walks the path beside the river daily as she mourns her daughter. Patrick Townsend, the oldest man in the book, is a frequent walker too. There's more walking here than in the average Jane Austen novel, and not much else to do in Beckford. We do learn that it's possible to buy milk and a newspaper somewhere, but everyone seems most drawn to the sinister, wet, lethal outskirts of town.

Patrick is the father of Sean Townsend, a detective assigned to look into Nel's death. Sean has his own traumatic history involving a drowned Beckford woman, but nobody thinks to bring it up before he's given the case. Sean's partner is Erin Morgan, who likes to run on the riverbank and does her best not to wonder what kind of crazy place this is. And Sean is married to but separated from Helen, head of the local school, who knew a lot about Katie and Lena's friendship. A teacher on Helen's staff, Mark Henderson, knows all the local teenagers, has had enough of the school system and would dearly love to get out of town.

Finally, and why not, there's the psychic. Her name is Nickie Sage and she looks and dresses like a goth witch. She knows a lot more than the police do about Beckford's endless parade of secrets.

Hawkins does not so much introduce these characters as throw them at the reader in rapid succession. There's no time to process who's who, and not much detail about any of them. The writing doesn't help: Nel's high school boyfriend (not even mentioned above) is ''tall, broad and blond, his lips curled into a perpetual sneer.'' One detective describes Beckford as ''a strange place, full of odd people, with a downright bizarre history.'' So much for prose. As for dialogue, Jules actually leans over Nel's corpse and whispers: ''What did you want to tell me?''

Many of us are going to read this novel anyway. Hawkins could have published a book of 386 blank pages and hit the best-seller lists. So on the bright side for those who insist: A few of the book's many killings happen for unexpectedly powerful reasons. The one that occurs in 1920 delivers a particularly strong shock. And even though Hawkins does a lot of needless obfuscating just to keep her story moving, she blows enough smoke to hide genuinely salient clues. ''Clues'' isn't quite the right word, since nobody in this book behaves logically, schemes cagily, has legitimate motives or relies on any sane staples of the murder story.

''Into the Water'' chugs off to a slow, perplexing start, but it develops a head of steam at an unlikely moment. It has exactly one smart, perfectly conceived Hitchcockian page: its last.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: Paula Hawkins has followed up her 2015 hit. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ALISA CONNAN)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Maslin, Janet. "Stay Away From the River." New York Times, 25 Apr. 2017, p. C2(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490531022&it=r&asid=f3768f7a48b1f4601c61b27d7718ef03. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A490531022
Danger lurks in Hawkins' 'Water'
(May 2, 2017): Lifestyle: p01D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/

Is it really fair of Paula Hawkins to conjure up a menacing body of water just as beach season beckons?

There are no sharks, a la Jaws, in Into the Water (Riverhead, 388 pp., *** out of four), other than the human sharks who lurk in the English riverside town of Beckford in this succulent new mystery by the author of The Girl on the Train.

Train, a debut psychological thriller, barreled out of nowhere to sell 19 million copies worldwide. Now Hawkins faces a tsunami of expectations with her follow-up to that twisty, voyeuristic tale of an alcoholic divorcee entangled in a possible murder.

The British author makes some perplexing choices early on that threaten to sink Into the Water in a sea of confusion: More than a dozen narrators. Shifts back and forth in time. Lots and lots of drowned girls.

Pay attention, because the various plot currents eventually converge, and then Into the Water takes off with a rush.

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. Did Nel, a photographer and writer who was investigating the Drowning Pool's many female victims (including 17th-century "witches"), jump, slip or was she pushed?

Left behind is Nel's hostile 15-year-old daughter, Lena, whose best friend committed suicide at the same place just weeks earlier.

Like Girl on the Train, this is a story disturbingly rife with misogyny and violence against women. 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.

So do dive in. The payoff is a socko ending, and a noirish beach read that might make you think twice about dipping a toe in those dark, chilly waters.

Hawkins will do a USA TODAY #BookmarkThis Facebook Live chat with fans May 9 at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. To learn more, visit hawkinschat.usatoday.com.

CAPTION(S):

photo
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Danger lurks in Hawkins' 'Water'." USA Today, 2 May 2017, p. 01D. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491052882&it=r&asid=bbf004d90b357bdf3aa804347f5953b4. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491052882
'Since We Fell' takes readers down dark roads
Matt Damasker
(May 9, 2017): Lifestyle: p03D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/

Byline: Matt Damsker, Special for USA TODAY

By the hundredth page of Dennis Lehane's new novel, Rachel Childs has solved the paternal mystery that sets her story in motion -- but with more than 300 pages to go, the real mystery begins.

How has her damaged childhood, at the will and whim of a bitterly withholding mother, prepared her for the perils of adulthood, the ups and downs of professional life, the risks and rewards of marriage?

As posed by Lehane -- whose muscular prose has powered such hits as Mystic River, Shutter Island and Gone Baby Gone -- these questions take on a familiar Bostonian accent in Since We Fell (Ecco, 432 pp., **1/2 out of four). This time he writes from the perspective of a young woman who hunts the truth to her breaking point, and to an even darker beyond.

In the process, Lehane aligns his Rachel Childs with the neo-feminist anti-heroines of such blockbusters as Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl or Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train. Since We Fell seems calibrated to follow them and Lehane's other best sellers to the big screen.

On the page, the surfeit of plot twists and emotional baggage are buoyed by Lehane's hard-boiled lyricism and peerless feel for New England noir.

Rachel's husband Brian, though, is at the center of her quest. She meets him when he's a private eye too honest to drain her bank account in a fruitless search for her unknown father. Before they meet again, Rachel will take on the world -- first as a journalist for The Boston Globe and then as a TV reporter covering Haiti's earthquake. This brings out the best in Lehane's writing (" the bodies burning like sacrificial appeasements, gray sulfur roiling amid the oily black smoke, the body within already an abstraction.").

Haiti's trauma becomes Rachel's trauma, and her on-air meltdown derails her career. Back in Boston, she retreats, racked by panic attacks, until she bumps into Brian, whose low-key charm and care bring her back from the edge. But it isn't long after they marry that Rachel must confront the fact that Brian may not be, well Brian.

There are a few possible novels in this one: Rachel's search for identity; the story of a privileged young journalist taken out of herself and her monoculture in a nightmare Haiti; scenes from a marriage tested by anxiety and ambition.

Instead, Lehane seems to shuffle his deck of plot cards as the narrative lurches, settling into a grinding action-crime procedural involving a gold mine scam, cliched hit men, gruesome murders and preposterous resurrections.

By the climax, Rachel has gone from shut-in to scuba-diving ninja, admirably self-reliant, but the moral clarity her character was arcing toward becomes a muddle of marital deceit and sappy romance. Lehane's goal for his heroine may have been ambitious, but -- like Brian -- he lets her down.

CAPTION(S):

photo Gaby Gerster.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Damasker, Matt. "'Since We Fell' takes readers down dark roads." USA Today, 9 May 2017, p. 03D. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491446038&it=r&asid=1c23b67284187116deb93b32c517ae68. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491446038

"Into the Water." Publishers Weekly, 20 Mar. 2017, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA487601751&asid=91285330caa7e5b5b8b984e1af3cb593. Accessed 25 May 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "Into the Water." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA490998440&asid=24218a4e40c59c16c20ac3a510a0f4ab. Accessed 25 May 2017. "Hawkins, Paula: INTO THE WATER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA482911854&asid=1b07ecb987fe3da7f569802050a4a0e9. Accessed 25 May 2017. Maslin, Janet. "Stay Away From the River." New York Times, 25 Apr. 2017, p. C2(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA490531022&asid=f3768f7a48b1f4601c61b27d7718ef03. Accessed 25 May 2017. "Danger lurks in Hawkins' 'Water'." USA Today, 2 May 2017, p. 01D. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491052882&asid=bbf004d90b357bdf3aa804347f5953b4. Accessed 25 May 2017. Damasker, Matt. "'Since We Fell' takes readers down dark roads." USA Today, 9 May 2017, p. 03D. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491446038&asid=1c23b67284187116deb93b32c517ae68. Accessed 25 May 2017.

• London Observer
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/16/paula-hawkins-into-the-water-review-girl-on-the-train-followup
  Word count: 744

  Into the Water by Paula Hawkins review – demanding thrills from Girl on a Train author

  Hawkins exchanges the simplicity and directness of her global bestseller for multiple narrators and plot lines
  The deaths by drowning pile up through the centuries in Paula Hawkins’s ‘creepy’ Into the Water
  The deaths by drowning pile up through the centuries in Paula Hawkins’s ‘creepy’ Into the Water. Photograph: JPagetRFphotos / Alamy/Alamy

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  Alison Flood

  Tuesday 16 May 2017 07.30 BST
  Last modified on Tuesday 16 May 2017 07.59 BST

  It’s impossible to pin down the alchemy that turns a novel like Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train into an unstoppable bestseller. It was a beautifully twisty, chilling thriller, but so were many others published in 2015. It can’t all be attributed to the magic of the now-ubiquitous “girl” in the title. But perhaps it has something to do with the apparent simplicity of its concept – a woman who drinks too much sees something she shouldn’t have from a train window. It’s easy to tell people about; it’s easy to imagine ourselves into the heroine’s situation.

  There’s no simple, one-line description for Hawkins’s follow-up, Into the Water, released two years after The Girl on the Train, when the author might have been still lounging around on the riches earned from global sales of 18m copies. In contrast to the three narrators of Girl, Into the Water has at least 11. Rather than digging into the lives of a few characters, Hawkins throws her net across an entire town. That’s Beckford, in the countryside near Newcastle, a place with a river running through it and a pool where women, “all those troublesome women”, have drowned themselves, or been drowned, for centuries. “People turned a blind eye, though, didn’t they? No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.”

  Hawkins’s story opens with the death of Nel Abbott in the Drowning Pool, a death that her teenage daughter Lena believes was suicide, but that Nel’s estranged sister Jules, summoned reluctantly back to Beckford, believes was something else. As Jules looks for answers, in her own past and among the locals, she finds that Nel has made a number of enemies while writing a book about the Beckford drownings, and that Lena’s best friend, Katie, died a few months earlier in the same place. “Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women,” Nel wrote.
  How we got to The Girl on the Train – the rise of the psychological thriller
  Read more

  There are so many strands that it’s hard to keep track, with viewpoints given to everyone from the local psychic to a school teacher, a headmistress and the police investigating Nel’s death. Hawkins provides us with more unreliable narrators than you can shake a stick at, and in case we forget they aren’t telling us, or even themselves, the whole truth, they say ominous things like “I couldn’t touch her. Not after what I’d done.”

  “Seriously: how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It’s like Midsomer Murders, only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head,” observes Erin, the outsider police officer who’s been banished to Beckford from London.

  Into the Water isn’t as slick or as clever – or as relatable – as The Girl on the Train, but it’s creepy enough, provided you can stay on top of the multiple voices and the deaths piling up through the centuries. The supernatural tinge given by the psychic might not be to everyone’s liking, but I think Hawkins pulls it off pretty nicely, and I will admit to having to put the novel aside when home alone one evening: my litmus test for scares.

  • Into the Water by Alison Flood is published by Doubleday (£15). To order a copy for £15 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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