Hawkins’ new potboiler flounders in the shallow end

At the conclusion of Into The Water, Paula Hawkins – the bestselling author of The Girl On The Train – spends two pages thanking all the early readers and “exceptional editors” who have helped her with this sophomore effort, a story of murder and suicide in deepest England.

Reader, I’ll be honest: I fairly growled when I got to this point. Help? What help had they been? No help. None at all.

If ...