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The Girl on the Train

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The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins Google ImagesOn the morning of January 13th, after the school bus drove away with my three little ones, I snuggled up on our worn couch with a faded patchwork quilt I’d made years ago, and a cup of tea, steeped to perfection with a pinch of sugar and a splash of milk.  I closed my eyes to the view of bare oaks and poplars and pines of evergreen outside our large bay window and brought myself back to the trains I used to ride into and out of town when I worked in the city.  The scraping, metallic screech of the wheels against the steel rails, the piercing hiss of the brakes like a string of exclamation marks, “Train’s here!”  The clippity-clop and sway once it’s reached a steady pace, often lulling me into a sleepy state perfect for daydreaming or getting lost in a book.  Once my head was in just the right place, I opened my eyes and focused for the next few hours on Paula Hawkin‘s The Girl on the Train, released, finally, that morning.

From the first paragraph, Hawkins puts you right on the train with Rachel, a complex and flawed protagonist who has developed a rich fantasy life about a couple she sees almost daily, on the back porch of their home, from her window on the train.  The couple lives only a few doors down from the home she used to share with her ex, the home in which her ex still lives with his new wife.  Rachel has snippets of dark, troubling memories wrapped around drunken black outs of having been in their neighborhood, entangled somehow with her ex, his wife and baby daughter, and the fantasy couple.  She knows she’s done something bad, but what?  Then the woman from the couple she’s been romanticizing, goes missing.  What happened to her?  And what does Rachel have to do with it?

Tess Gerritsen, author of many grittty crime novels, was spot on when she said, “So thrilling and tense and wildly unpredictable it sucked up my entire afternoon.”   Hawkins yanked me into this atmospheric psychological thrill ride of a book and there was no stopping until the last satisfying sentence.

Have you read it?  What did you think?  Any psychological thrillers you would recommend?



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