By too many voices
while Lauren, who drowned in the pool 30 years earlier, was seen by her own son jumping to her death. Or so the story goes. There have been other mysterious drownings too, which Abbott had been researching when she died.
Hawkins has arranged her narrative into short, bitty chapters, sometimes only a page or two long, which flip between at least 14 characters, some of whom narrate, others whose stories are told in the third person. Reviewers’ opinions vary on the exact number; regardless, readers will have to work hard to figure out who’s who and to remember what his or her relationship is to the next person.
The men are without exception nasty. One turns out to be a rapist, another a paedophile, another a wife-beater and so on, but then men behaving badly — especially towards women — is another hardcore grip-lit device, since the genre is written mostly by and for women. Not that the female characters, who frequently hiss and catcall each other names like “stupid bitch” and “fucking narcissist”, are much better.
As each character’s back story is gradually revealed, it turns out that an unusally large number of their memories are false ones. In all the confusion, the only certainty is that almost everyone in the village hated Nel Abbott.
Film rights have been snapped up, natch, and the book is doubtless bound for bestsellerdom. But Hawkins’s device of using her characters’ false memories to keep twisting the direction of the plot does overstretch credibility. Will her legion of fans be disappointed ? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.