Drowned out

INTO THE WATER by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday, £20)

REPLICATING the success of The Girl on the Train was never going to be easy for Paula Hawkins, not least because of the deluge of grip-lit from a thousand copycat authors desperate to cash in on the formula pioneered by Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl.

Literary editors are knee-deep in books whose murky covers boast every kind of unreliable narrator, from murderous husbands and lying sisters to vengeful mothers and missing children. Some losses of memory are so extreme because the characters are actually dead, reminiscing from beyond the grave.

So the question is how much further would Hawkins have to go to pull off her follow-up? The answer is pretty much all the way. Into the Water is altogether more ambitious than TGOTT, with a much bigger cast of characters, a historical element — witches — and not just your basic twist but a continuum of twists that, well, keep on twisting.

Set in a village called Beckford near Newcastle, the story revolves around a stretch of river known as the Drowning Pool. In previous centuries witches were drowned there but its most recent casualty is Nel Abbott, a middle-aged woman who may have fallen in by accident, may have killed herself, or may have been pushed.

Her daughter, angry, disaffected 15-year-old Lena, thinks she jumped, while Nel’s estranged sister Jules, returning to Beckford for the first time in years, isn’t so sure.

There have been other mishaps too. Months earlier Lena’s best friend Katie died, apparently a suicide,