The Girl on the Train – by Paula Hawkins – independent book review – Mystery

I whipped through this best-selling book in a little more than a day. It’s a fast read, a whodunit, with chapters that tell the story piece by piece from different characters’ perspectives. It is not great literature and I expect that all the hype the book has gotten is because the ending does come as a surprise and there are lots of twists and turns along the way. Awarded three stars on Goodreads.

The story centers on two couples who live a few houses apart on a street in London.

• Tom, Anna, and their baby are being harassed by Tom’s ex-wife, Rachel, a heavy drinker who is out of work and taking the divorce hard. Rachel is the one who likes to watch people from the window of the commuter train and imagine she can figure out their lives from observation alone.

• The second couple, Megan and Scott, see their own marriage very differently from one another and Megan is keeping a couple of very big secrets.

Of course it turns out all the characters are keeping secrets. And one of them is about a murder. The book is a narrative of how those secrets get either discovered or revealed.

I’d put this in the category of good beach read — fast moving, absorbing, but lightweight.