Rating 2.5 
 I suppose I'll start by saying I enjoyed Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, which I know is a potentially dangerous thing to say among impassioned readers, but there it is. Two years ago that book got me out of a reading slump that lasted way too long, and has kept me reading consistently ever since. 
 So out of some unspoken loyalty to The Girl on the Train, I picked up a copy of Into the Water. I had high hopes, I really did, but I just couldn't enjoy it as much as I did her previous book. 
 The mystery was there, but it is ultimately muddled by the sheer number of characters (I counted at least fifteen!) crammed into piece of writing that is just shy of four hundred pages. In TGOTT, we dealt with a reasonable handful of important players and a foggy timeline, but this book brings it to a new level of confusion. Everyone is introduced to us so quickly and there's almost no time to ask Wait, who is this?, before we're introduced to yet another character with a mile long sinister background. 
 Ultimately I felt that the the question of why did Nel Abbott die? did not need to be answered by the analysis of over fifteen characters, and once it was finally addressed I was left underwhelmed.