Into the Water
In the last days of summer, single mother Nel Abbott is found dead at the bottom of the river that runs through the town of Beckford, in a stretch of water locals call the Drowning Pool. She is not the first woman to die there. For centuries the pool has claimed troubled women, and only weeks earlier it took the life of a teenage girl.
Nel's estranged sister Jules returns to the town she fled long ago, terrified of the water and unwilling to believe the death was suicide. She must care for Nel's grieving fifteen-year-old daughter while confronting the buried history between them and a community full of people with reasons to keep the past submerged.
Told through a chorus of voices, each with its own secrets and blind spots, Paula Hawkins's second thriller is a dark, atmospheric mystery about memory, grief, and the stories a town tells about its women, and the dangerous gap between what we remember and what really happened.
Nel's estranged sister, who returns to Beckford after the death and fears the water.
The single mother found drowned in the Beckford pool, obsessed with the river's history.
Nel's grieving fifteen-year-old daughter.
A detective investigating the drownings.