Suspense | Book Chatter

Something in the Water
By Catherine Steadman
Ballantine Books, 9781524797676, April 2019, 384pp.

The Short of It:

When I picked this one up I was thinking it would be along the lines of Jaws or The Abyss. Not a spoiler but ocean life is not a big player here.

The Rest of It:

Erin makes documentaries for a living. Mark is an investment banker and not a very good one as he’s just been fired. Erin and Mark are engaged, in love and completely stressed out because if Mark doesn’t find a job soon, they’ll lose their home.

To add insult to injury, the big, beautiful wedding they had planned had to be cancelled due to cost. They opt for a smaller celebration and cut their glorious three weeks in Bora Bora to a mere two but they still manage to get themselves into trouble when a scuba diving trip goes wrong.

These two. What a pair! You learn very early on that Erin and Mark don’t seem to posses the highest morals. They are manipulative and don’t have a problem justifying their bad decisions. When that scuba diving trip uncovers the answer to their all their troubles, they don’t hesitate at all before diving head first into a pile of trouble.

As Erin and Mark continue to justify their actions, things begin to crumble around them and they find themselves trying to cover up their tracks. When they begin to question one another, then it gets particularly good.

Something in the Water was quite readable. The tension ran high throughout most of the book and I kept flipping those pages to see how the story would end. I didn’t love the characters and some of the story lines were too convenient and not realistic at all so in the end I didn’t love it but reading it was a solid way to spend the afternoon.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

The Women in the Window
By A.J. Finn
William Morrow Paperbacks, 9780062678423, March 2019, 464pp.

The Short of It:

If you enjoy unreliable narrators then you will be entertained.

The Rest of It:

The Woman in the Window is another book that everyone seems to have read. When it first came out, I took an immediate interest in it but then, for whatever reason it got pushed down to the bottom of my list. THEN, there was the controversy over its author. But when my local used bookstore had a copy sitting on the shelf, I grabbed it.

Dr. Anna Fox is a psychiatrist but suffers from agoraphobia. The reason for her agoraphobia is not revealed until much later in the story, but she spends her days watching old, black and white movies, spying on her neighbors from the safety of her home, and drinking buckets of Merlot. Just like every Hitchcock movie you’ve ever seen, she witnesses a crime. But when she reports it, no one believes her because she comes off as a drunk, mentally unstable woman. Which by all counts is not wrong.

There is more to the story, of course. I figured out the twist pretty early on but it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book overall. I will say this, why so much booze? There is a booze reference on every page. Anna’s condition was enough to make her the unreliable narrator of our dreams but the constant mention of Merlot drove me absolutely nuts and reminded me a lot of the protagonist from The Girl on the Train.

The movie trailer looks really good: