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Into the Water, in detail
In a small English town, women have been dying in a river pool called the Drowning Pool for centuries. The latest is Nel Abbott, apparently fallen or jumped from a cliff above the water. Her estranged sister Jules arrives to care for Nel's teenage daughter Lena, who is grieving and hostile and may know more than she's saying. The investigation involves a cast of interconnected townspeople — a detective with his own history with the pool, the parents of a schoolgirl who died there earlier that year — all narrated in rotating close third-person perspectives.
Into the Water is Hawkins' follow-up to The Girl on the Train, and it's a more ambitious and more flawed book. The ambition is the multi-narrator structure — there are more than ten distinct perspectives — and the attempt to braid a contemporary mystery with the historical mythology of women drowned as witches or dangerous wives. The flaw is that with this many voices, none of them quite lands as deeply as Rachel did in the previous book. The novel asks for investment in a dozen characters simultaneously and achieves it with only a few of them.
The pool's mythology is the most interesting element: Hawkins uses the idea that this location has specifically been used to eliminate inconvenient women — the difficult, the sexual, the ones who didn't conform — as a frame for the contemporary story. Nel was researching this history before she died; her manuscript hangs over the investigation. The town is protecting something; the question is what, and which of the many narrators is hiding it.
Hawkins is better at constructing female interiority than the mechanics of thriller plotting, and Into the Water shows that imbalance. The first third is genuinely confusing — too many voices introduced too quickly — and the mystery's resolution requires the reader to track threads across perspectives in a way that feels more effortful than rewarding. But the Jules-Lena dynamic is the book's emotional core, and the historical layer about women and rivers gives this one a darker register than The Girl on the Train.
The big ideas
- 1.
The Drowning Pool's historical function — a place where inconvenient women were disposed of under various pretexts across centuries — is the novel's central metaphor and its most resonant element.
- 2.
Nel's manuscript about the pool women runs as a counterpoint to the investigation. Her research was getting somewhere before she died.
- 3.
The multi-narrator structure serves the book's argument — that community silence requires everyone's participation — but it disperses the emotional investment.
