Hawkins’ follow-up requires patience

And readers thought Rachel Watson, that girl on the train, was an unreliable narrator.

Paula Hawkins — whose debut thriller was the topselling book in America for the past two years — has upped the ante in her goodbut-not-great follow-up.

“Into the Water” is dripping with first- and third-person narration that cannot be trusted. While the heroine of “The Girl on the Train” had issues with alcoholism and blackouts, there are other reasons for literary deception in the new book.

Some of the characters are liars. Some have incomplete or willfully selective memories. Some are just crazy. All have secrets.

The story is set in a small town called Beckford, a throwback riverside community in northern England. ■ “Into the Water” (Riverhead, 400 pages, $28) by Paula Hawkins One particular bend in the river is a spot that has come to be known as the Drowning Pool. It is a place with a dark history, widely regarded as “a suicide spot.”

It is also ominously said to be “a place to get rid of troublesome women,” but people don’t talk about it.

Then Danielle Abbott, planning to write a book, starts asking too many pointed questions, ruffles too many feathers and makes too many enemies. As they say in Beckford, she is a troublesome woman.

Perhaps inevitably, a 15-year-old girl — the best friend to Abbott’s just-astroublesome daughter Lena — turns up dead, an apparent Drowning Pool suicide. The dead girl’s grieving mom blames Danielle.

Then, weeks later, Danielle herself dies suspiciously, her body pulled out of the very same water.

The woman’s estranged sister Jules, who nearly drowned there two decades earlier and is still deeply traumatized, wants to know why these tragedies keep happening. And a new police investigation, unlike the ones for previous deaths, is more than just a formality/ cover-up.

Eventually, all the secrets, past and present, like bodies in the Drowning Pool, will come to the surface: abusive relationships, illicit affairs, rapes, murders. Many of these crimes are interrelated — linked by one particular piece of evidence, a necklace, that changes hands more than a dog-eared library book does.

The problem with “Into the Water” is that, while creepy from the get-go, it’s not the page-turner that “The Girl on the Train” was. It’s a slow-starter — glacially slow. After more than 200 pages, Hawkins gets it into gear, dropping bombshell after bombshell, chapter after chapter.

If the author didn’t have such stellar credentials — more than 20 million copies of “The Girl on the Train” sold worldwide — maybe her publisher would have insisted on revisions.

Most readers who have been eagerly awaiting her new book will probably have enough patience. But should they really have to wait?