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Summary
Summary
From Yannick Murphy, award-winning author of The Call, comes a fast-paced story of murder, adultery, parenthood, and romance, involving a girls' swim team, their morally flawed parents, and a killer who swims in their midst.
In a quiet New England community members of swim team and their dedicated parents are preparing for a home meet. The most that Annie, a swim-mom of two girls, has to worry about is whether or not she fed her daughters enough carbs the night before; why her husband, Thomas, hasn't kissed her in ages; and why she can't get over the loss of her brother who shot himself a few years ago.
But Annie's world is about to change. From the bleachers, looking down at the swimmers, a dark haired man watches a girl. No one notices him. Annie is busy getting to know Paul, who flirts with Annie despite the fact that he's married to her friend Chris, and despite Annie's greying hair and crow's feet. Chris is busy trying to discover whether or not Paul is really having an affair, and the swimmers are trying to shave milliseconds off their race times by squeezing themselves into skin-tight bathing suits and visualizing themselves winning their races.
When a girl on the team is murdered at a nearby highway rest stop--the same rest stop where Paul made a gruesome discovery years ago--the parents suddenly find themselves adrift. Paul turns to Annie for comfort. Annie finds herself falling in love. Chris becomes obsessed with unmasking the killer.
With a serial killer now too close for comfort, Annie and her fellow swim-parents must make choices about where their loyalties lie. As a series of startling events unfold, Annie discovers what it means to follow your intuition, even if love, as well as lives, could be lost.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With her obscenely suspenseful latest, Murphy (The Call, named one of PW's best books of 2011), who is known for her stylistic experimentation, tries out a second-person perspective and a continual "this is" structure that takes some getting used to, but that works thanks to the fact that the author breaks up the book into 48 short chapters. "You" are Annie, a New England mom driving your two daughters to and from swim meets, married to an emotionally aloof husband whose encyclopedic mind and frequent recitations of factual tidbits drive you crazy. But you, the novel's protagonist, don't know everything that you, the reader, know-for instance, only the reader knows the identity of a serial killer scoping out potential next victims on the swim team. Therefore the book's real tension centers on which of the characters will uncover the killer first, making this inverted murder mystery a "whogotit" rather than a whodunit. Potential detectives include the beautiful Chris, a fellow swim team parent; her husband, Paul, whom Annie develops a crush on; Mandy, the facility janitor; and even the unlikely Dinah, one of the more amusing characters-a villain of the judgmental suburban mom variety. Though the novel starts off galloping, it does slow in the middle as Annie's thoughts become tiresomely repetitive (she dwells on Paul to distract herself from recurring memories of her brother's suicide, even after Paul reveals to her his secret connection to the ongoing murders). But in Murphy's hands, the structure becomes almost hypnotic-and when the story hits full speed in the final quarter, the suspense becomes almost excruciating. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An offbeat thriller sets a serial killer loose among young swimmers in New England and tests the readers tolerance for textual quirks.Countless sentences begin This is, as Murphy (The Call, 2011, etc.) assumes the voice of a preschool teacher to detail the world of pre-college swimming, where hours of repetitive practice are distilled in seconds of competition monitored by anxious parents. Murphy also presents the thoughts of swim-mom Annie in what for this woman is the aptly self-conscious you of the second person. Stalking all the damp, dewy young flesh is a serial killer who has been on a break for many years when he suddenly decides to renew his slaughter. Revealed early in the book, he is craftily tied to a handsome swim dads college fling. Other flings are mulled as Handsomes wife, Chris, suspects him of present-day dalliance. She seeks solace from Annie, who becomes infatuated with Handsome between bouts of revisiting her brothers suicide. As one slashed girl surfaces and more victims are expected, Murphy seasons the rising tension with humor, especially through a nicely sketched overbearing busybody who knows everything except how close she is to the killer. The author also manages to suggest with the repetition of This is the rhythm of bedside readings in childhood, reflecting innocence lost in more than one way for this unfairy tale, not to mention the constant refrain of all those laps up and down the pool. Even for readers who might still hear an annoying tic, the books other, straightforward writing is often more than a cut above the thriller norm.Murphy sometimes recalls the exurban tribulations and titillations of Peter De Vriesalbeit without all the punsin a different sort of murder yarn that boasts twists in both the style and the plot. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This is the water . . . This is the swim mom . . . This is the facility. This is the cadence of virtuoso Murphy's latest propulsive, psychologically lush, witty, and unpredictable novel, a tale of young competitive swimmers and their parents. In her tenth book, Murphy deepens her immersion in Vermont family life, rendered so intriguingly in The Call (2011), and adds a chilling dimension. With two daughters on the swim team, wedding photographer Annie is versed in the finer points of practice and meet protocol (don't mess with the coach) and racing suits (impossible to put on, painful to wear), though she struggles with the relentless demands of chauffeuring, laundry, cooking, and cajoling. She is also grieving in the wake of her brother's suicide and worrying about her scientist husband's indifference to her. And she must contend with other swim moms: Dina, who is impossibly aggressive,andenviably beautiful Chris, who is worried that her equally dazzling husband is having an affair. Everything abruptly changes when a lovely and gifted swimmer is murdered. Will the terrified and enraged swim moms wait passively for justice? Murphy's evocation of feverish competition, stressed marriages, and the shocking banality of a serial killer's inner life coalesce in a novel of acute observation, penetrating imagination, and rare agility that is capped by a resounding denouement.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
RULES, RULES, so many stupid rules: "Don't switch point of view." "Don't give away the identity of the killer." "Don't write in the second person." Yannick Murphy, an author who seems drawn to high cliffs, ignores all the warnings in THIS IS THE WATER (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99), an inventive thriller set in suburbia - and in the troubled minds of her characters. The second-person narrative voice that feels alienating at the outset ("This is the water This is the swim mom This is the bathroom") soon becomes hypnotic ("This is you, Annie") and then seriously unsettling ("This is the killer"). Annie, the mother of two girls on a competitive swim team, is the most appealing of all the moms in their pretty New England town who shell out $1,000 per child to get their kids on the team and hundreds more for those sadistically engineered racing suits that are supposed to shave milliseconds off their records. But while Annie dutifully volunteers to time the girls' practice swims and drive to out-of-town meets, she can never satisfy a fanatic like Dinah, who monitors everyone's moves and complains that "Annie and her daughters always seem to be doing what they're not supposed to do." One of the things Annie is definitely not supposed to be doing is having an affair with her friend's husband. But she's become morbidly depressed about her brother's suicide and she gets no comfort from her husband, whose business worries have made him lose all interest in sex. Under Murphy's probing touch, everyone in their circle of friends and neighbors is revealed to be struggling with the same kinds of personal strains. Husbands are distant, wives are distracted, oblivious to everything but their own problems. Which leaves only the sports facility's socially invisible cleaning lady with the clarity of vision to spot the killer in their midst. Murphy proves skillful at generating a proper climate of dread, forcing us to focus our fears on the killer's next victim. But her real accomplishment is her study of the anxieties reflected in the exacting rules of the club. "There is no crying at swim meets" is the first rule that needs smashing, for the mental health of the stressed-out moms and tightly wound girls we've come to care about. DESPITE ALL the guts and gore, David Mark's British police procedurals are a wholesome corrective to cop novels starring prima donna detectives who single-handedly solve major murder cases. Sgt. Aector McAvoy, the "gentle, humble, shy giant of a man" who commands our attention in SORROW BOUND (Blue Rider, $26.95), is clearly the hero of this brawny series set in the north of England. But, in the honorable tradition of Ed Me Bain and Joseph Wambaugh, proper attention is also paid to the other members of his homicide team. McAvoy, who is "O.K. with blood" and has a way of getting people to confide in him, is the right man to investigate the savage murder of a local political activist who tangled with an organized drug operation. But Mark surrounds his Scottish detective with fellow officers who make vital contributions to the case and are interesting in their own right. Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh comes the closest to being a rock star, with her biker boots, deep cleavage, thick mascara and "truckloads of attitude." But there are more where she came from, and at least one of these cops is scarier than the bad guys. THERE ARE CERTAIN advantages to being an auto mechanic. At least that's the case for Conway Sax, who moonlights as a sleuth in the latest of Steve Ulfelder's rural Massachusetts mysteries, WOLVERINE BROS. FREIGHT & STORAGE (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $26.99). As a man who prefers to work off the grid, Conway is pleased to be taken for someone who "looks like he came to pump out the septic," but as a former racecar driver, he can't resist throwing himself into breakneck car chases. Conway is the kind of daredevil hero who follows his passions, fueling the fury he feels when Eudora Spoon, a dear friend and a legend in his local A.A. chapter, dies in his arms after being shot by a sniper. "Everybody pays" is his mantra as he goes tearing after the villains who value an old lady's land more than they do her life. DETROIT WOULD SURELY rise again if that battered city could only wake up to find itself in 1968, reliving opening day at Tiger Stadium. In MOTOR CITY BURNING (Pegasus, $24.95), Bill Morris extends that promise of rebirth and redemption to Willie Bledsoe, who broke faith with the idealism of the civil rights movement when he and his brother ran a load of guns up to Detroit in advance of the 1967 race riots. But that particular violence is past, the Tigers are looking good, and Willie has a classic car (a pink and black '54 Buick Century). Sad to say, there's no peace or joy for the repentant Willie, who has also acquired a shadow, a cop named Frank Doyle who suspects him of having shot Victim #43, the last casualty in the last unsolved homicide of the riots. Morris sees something heroic in these well-matched adversaries, both representative of a city the author loves and salutes for "its swagger, its work ethic, its dirty fingernails and thick wrists, its ability to accommodate a crazy quilt of races and ethnic groups, shoulder to shoulder." And, of course, its great ball club.
