So I finished this a couple of days ago and as I went to set the rating today, I couldn't remember what it was about. So that doesn't bode well for a book. It wasn't a book that grabbed me but it was oddly compelling to finish as I wanted to know what happened. But there was a lot of time line switching and perspective change. That I just couldn't keep track with the haphazzard way I was reading---meaning I had to force myself to pick the book back up and I mainly did because I have several partially read books and I wanted to finish something...once I picked it up, it held my attention. I think it tried to hard to have a gimmick and twists. Or maybe, I'm just suffering from reader's block and nothing is good enough for me right now. ( )

I liked this much better than her other book. The suspense was artfully created. The multiple POV characters added to the tension.
And the ending! That's all I'll say. ( )

Real rating 3.5.
A great twisty read. Lots of characters and, at first, they were hard to keep track of. I kept forgetting how each was connected and only learned even more cross-over the more I read. Luckily I enjoyed this with a book club and, each week, we'd check in and connect the dots I kept losing. Although I really like how this concluded, messy and a bit midway in everyone's lives, I felt it was a bit hechtic to get to the conclusion. ( )

When a young man is found gruesomely murdered, it triggers questions about three women with separate connections to the victim, who are--for different reasons--simmering with resentment and a desire for revenge.

All 3 women were disturbed in some way: Laura was erratic from a brain injury due to a car accident, Miriam didn’t trust anyone due to being kidnapped as a teenager, and Carla had bouts of depression from losing her young son in an accident. I didn’t like any of them or feel much sympathy either. The story was well-written and interesting enough for me to want to find out who the killer was but didn’t really draw me in. I enjoyed The Girl on the Train but this was only a so-so read for me. ( )

Book on CD read by Rosamund Pike.

If you like unreliable narrators, this is the book for you. Hawkins gives us not one, not two, but a plethora of unreliable narrators to tell this twisty tale of dysfunctional families and murder.

It begins when Miriam, a middle-aged woman living aboard a narrowboat on an English canal, discovers the body of a young man on a neighboring boat. For her own reasons, she takes a piece of evidence from the scene before calling the police. Then there is Laura, a disturbed young woman, suffering from traumatic brain injury as a result of a hit-and-run accident when she was ten. Laura has anger management and impulse control issues, and had engaged in a one-night stand with the deceased. The victims aunt, Carla, and her husband, Theo, are seemingly successful; he’s a writer of a best-seller, though apparently suffering writer’s block. She’s been secretly visiting with Daniel aboard his boat, feeling guilty about the death of Daniel’s mother, her sister a short time before Daniel was murdered. And finally, we have Irene, an elderly woman whom Laura has befriended and who was friends with Carla’s late sister. Irene seems to be showing some early signs of diminished memory and occasionally seems quite confused.

Hawkins changes points of view among these various characters, giving us clues to their background, their relationship with the deceased and with each other, and keeping the reader (as well as the police) off balance.

It’s not great literature, but it certainly held my attention.

Rosamund Pike does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. She has a lot of characters to deal with, most of them female, and she was up to the task. ( )