Published by Grand Central Publishing on June 13, 2023
Lee is homeless but she has romance on her mind when she meets a hunky guy who doesn’t immediately try to take advantage of her. Maybe focus on finding a place to live before you start dreaming about wedding bells but hey, that’s just me.
Lee owned a New York restaurant that was starting to be trendy before the pandemic shut it down. She couldn’t pay her bills so her gangster investor (strike 1) broke her finger and threatened to break the rest if he didn’t get his money back. She tried to blackmail her sister’s fiancé (strike 2) but only made an enemy out of her sister. To keep her fingers intact, she fled to the Pacific Northwest and is living in her car, working off the books as a waitress at a diner. The plot to this point is trite but just barely plausible. Unfortunately, plausible plotting is soon abandoned.
Lee is parked by the ocean when she sees a fully dressed woman walk into the water. Hazel is trying to drown herself as an alternative to living with an abusive husband. Lee rescues her. Hazel started out in a consensual dominant/submissive relationship (she envisioned a 50 Shades of Gray thing) with Benjamin, then moved to a consensual master/slave relationship (complete with a Total Power Exchange contract that no American court would enforce), but her consent and the limits she set eventually became unimportant. Hazel is a gold digger so, apart from sympathy for the abuse she endured, I found it difficult to care about her as a character.
After the rescue, Hazel asks Lee to teach her how to disappear from a threatening environment. Yet Lee fled impulsively, with no plan at all, and managed to get robbed when she parked in a bad neighborhood. She’s living in a car. Would Lee seriously believe that Hazel wants to emulate her?
A hot personal trainer named Jesse comes into the diner where Lee is working and asks her to have a drink with him. Lee seduces him on their third date and is thrilled to feel “seen” again, particularly after Hazel snubs her in public. She’s also thrilled to use Jesse’s shower and sleep in a real bed. After a good shag, she feels that she is “more than my mistakes.” It will be obvious to everyone but Lee that her self-congratulation is premature.
Hazel comes up with a sketchy plan to switch places with Lee (they miraculously look like twins after Lee gets her hair done) for a couple of hours, long enough for Hazel to thwart her husband’s surveillance and hop on a plane. I suspect that most readers will immediately think that entering Hazel’s home while pretending to be Hazel is both dangerous and stupid and that Hazel is playing Lee, but Hazel offers Lee a nice chunk of money to do it.
Both Hazel and Jesse send up a series of red flags but Lee is apparently too trusting to notice Hazel’s and too love struck to recognize Jesse’s. Lee sees the world from a naïve perspective that doesn’t match up with a homeless woman who fled from a gangster and encountered nothing but trouble thereafter. She eventually feels betrayed by two people she believed were “honest and decent.” I get it, but she only recently met both these people and had to ignore multiple warning signs to conclude that they were on her side. I find it hard to care about a character who is so remarkably dim.
I was prepared to write off The Drowning Woman as a waste of time until, soon after Lee enters Hazel’s home, the plot turns in a surprising direction. Unfortunately, Robyn Harding immediately kills the momentum by changing the point of view from Lee to Hazel and filling in Hazel’s backstory. Hazel, like Lee, fell head-over-heels in love, not with one man but with two. The women in this book think like characters in romance novels. Because they do not behave rationally, needless trouble ensues for everyone.
Hazel’s rewriting of Lee’s story from Hazel’s perspective brings us back to the surprising moment, which is no longer a surprise but is not yet explained. Point of view then shifts back to Lee, who would run like a rabbit if she had any sense, but that wouldn’t be much of a story. Lee decides to investigate a death for which she might be blamed, then discovers another fact (one unknown to Hazel) that places all the past events in another new light. Lee’s section ends with her discovery of yet another secret, but she doesn’t reveal it — even though she’s narrating events in the first person — because Harding wants to save it to set up the ending. Harding defeats the trust a first-person narrator should build with a reader by having her narrator describe her actions in real time while withholding her most important discovery at the moment she makes it.
Back to Hazel, who make a series of stupid decisions, including lying to the police. You’d think the wife of a criminal defense lawyer would know of her right to say, “I don’t want to answer questions about that topic.” Most of Hazel’s narrative is preposterous. Characters effortlessly hack telephones and obtain fake passports. The brief description of legal proceedings betrays an unfamiliarity with the law. The ending — well, pretty much the last half of the novel — is less than engaging. Multiple loose ends continue to dangle at the story’s end (e.g., how do police deduce from a jawbone that washed ashore that the victim was stabbed in the chest multiple times?). The novel’s first half at least generates mild suspense, but it fizzles out well before the end. An epilog delivers a feel-good resolution to the protagonists’ lives that feels forced.
Two unlikable protagonists stuck in an unbelievable plot compete to see which one will make the worst decisions. Some of the setup is interesting but the novel in its entirety doesn’t live up to its modestly promising start.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS