Hysteria 
 I thought this would be just the kind of audiobook to take on a long car journey, and indeed its eleven hours took me almost exactly from Georgia to Maryland. But it made for a rather disturbing, even depressing trip. Of course, you do not expect a thriller to induce a state of calm, but I would have preferred it had the story drawn me in, working out the clues, enjoying the twists. There was a bit of that, but for the most part I felt captive to the breathless hysteria of three first-person narrators (read by three different readers)--all rather dislikable women of around thirty who consistently make stupid choices. 
 Actually, I was quite impressed by the exposition. On her daily commute into London, Rachel, the title character, makes up little stories about the young couple in a house giving onto the line where the train regularly stops at a signal. One day, she notices something that breaks the pattern, and begins to worry. Then we get a different narrator, the actual woman whom Rachel has been observing, but she is talking about a period a year earlier. Gradually, we discover that the picture we had formed of both women is wrong in just about every important respect. We also learn that, though they do not know each other, there is a connection between them through Rachel's ex-husband and his new wife, who eventually becomes the third narrator. 
 That's about as far as I should go. However, within a few pages we discover that Rachel is an alcoholic. This is a two-edged sword. I soon came to hate seeing her down two bottles of wine at a time, lose control in public, and lie to her friends and herself. At the same time, her condition and her tendency to have blackouts makes her the perfect Unreliable Narrator. When it seems that there has been a crime, and she comes home bleeding and incontinent, neither she nor the listener can be sure whether she has been a witness, a victim, or even the killer. Neither of the other narrators is that far gone, but all three hide the truth behind the lies they tell themselves and others. 
 The novel could do with being 40% shorter. There is an awful lot of angst to be gotten through in each chapter before we get to some significant event or new piece of information; with characters who went straight to the truth, the whole thing could have been over in 150 pages. The print reader soon knows when to read fast and when to linger, but the audiobook listener is captive to the pace of the three narrators. All of these are good, not only in delineating their own characters, but also in giving voice to the many others (even the men) encountered by each. But Hawkins' tendency to write in very short sentences makes for a breathless subdued hysteria throughout. And the general fecklessness of almost all the characters makes the story frustrating and depressing by turns, with simply not enough of the mystery element to compensate.