The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Recommended to me by my wife, The Girl on The Train by Paula Hawkins is a murder mystery, a story about the remarkable intertwining of psychopathologies. Tom and Rachel were married, but their marriage fell apart when she couldn’t get pregnant. Rachel became depressed, and descended into blackout alcoholism. Tom started an affair with Anna who quickly became pregnant, and he moved Rachel out of the house so he could move Anna in. Their row house, on the outskirts of London, was next to the same railroad tracks that Rachel used to commute to her job everyday, and then she continued commuting after she was fired for drunkenness on the job, just so she could look at her home where she was once happy. She kept having fantasies about the lives of one of the couples in another of the row houses, just a few doors down from where she had lived with Tom, and she could see into their house as the train came to a stop there everyday. She thought of them as Jess and Jason, and Rachel imagined that they had a perfect love for one another. But they were really Megan and Scott, and they too had their troubles. Megan suddenly disappeared, and so the mystery began.

It took me a little while to figure out who the characters were and to understand where the author was going with this story. The story was about the three women, Rachel, Anna, and Megan, but also the spouses, Tom and Scott. None of these people were emotionally healthy and Megan had a particularly dark past. Hawkins writes with remarkable skill about the life of a blackout drunk who is struggling to deal with her disease and to distinguish reality from her own fantasies. Within about 75 pages, I was well in the grip of the story. It definitely gets my recommendation.