The Girl on the Train

Finished February 16
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

This thriller is worthy of its hype. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down and read it all in one day. Rachel is recently and unhappily divorced. She is living in a spare room at a friend's place, and she takes the train into London every morning and back in the evening, going past the house she used to live in with her husband Tom, and where he now lives with his new wife and infant daughter. A few houses down, another young couple lives, a couple that seems happy, and Rachel watches them, taking happiness from their seemed happiness, until one day she sees something that puts a lie to that happiness. When she sees a newspaper story a few days later indicating that the woman has been missing since the evening of the morning Rachel saw the scene that disturbed her, she feels she must find out what happened. She goes to the police, but they don't seem to take her information seriously, and so she approaches those involved.
Her renewed presence in the street upsets her ex-husband's new wife Anna, but Tom seems to want to handle it himself, asking Rachel a lot of questions that she isn't prepared to answer. As Rachel digs deeper, she begins to look at how others view her, and the unreliability of her observations and memories in their eyes. What truth is there in what they say she has wrong?
Rachel is an interesting character, damaged deeply by her failed marriage and still not recovered from that experience. As the book unfolds, we see what brought her to where she is now, and what inner strength she has to keep her questioning what is happening.
I can't recommend it highly enough.