Bookworks Presents Its June Edition of IT'S ABOUT BOOKS

Dear Bookworks Bookworm

Wow! What a book The Girl on the Train is by Paula Hawkins! It is a thriller to beat all thrillers. Just the perfect mix of everything: murder, deceit, illicit affairs, buried secrets and one very alcoholic protagonist who doesn't remember anything until the end, of coarse. Rachel, our narrator, lives in a blur between being stupid drunk and fantasy land. Alcohol has destroyed her marriage however she is, in her mind, still inexorably tied to her ex-husband Tom who has wasted no time in marrying Anna. Tom has moved Anna into the house along the train tracks that he and Rachel once shared. Rachel can't help herself. She calls and harasses Tom and Anna each time she gets stupid drunk, which is every night.

Just a bit down the road live Scott and Megan, an equally troubled pair. These five lives unravel in Britain (rather than the US) which, for me, makes the story even more charming. The roar of the train that Rachel rides to London each day stays in our ears throughout the book. Rachel has no reason to go to London as she as been fired from her job months ago (for showing up drunk after lunch), but go she does to maintain her fiction, paying close attention to the happenings in back yard of her old house as she passes. She is particularly fascinated by what she sees happening Scott and Megan's back yard deck which fronts the tracks as does her old house. From the window of the train she makes up the scenarios about what she sees as she lumbers past, of loving husbands, of affairs, of the happiness which is only a distant memory for her.

Rachel is a mess. And one morning she wakes up and finds that she is even more of a mess that unusual. Naked, bruised, bloodied and filthy with no recollection of just what happened the night before. Coincidentally, Megan goes missing on the very same night. Something keeps nagging at Rachel, forcing her investigate this disappearance just as a moth is drawn to flame. Inappropriate, misconstrued Rachel wants to solve the crime fearing all along that she is the "perp."

What ensues is one damnable piece of evidence after another pointing directly at Rachel. Interestingly enough, she eventually does solve the mystery despite her impaired state. This is a perfect summer read. The book does not bog down at any intersection but flies along just as that daily train does from one satisfying station to the next.

Joanne Matzenbacher
Editor, It's About Books