Patrick Carey

And she's very much in that classic post-university slump of not really liking the first job that she's got out of school, not really sure where she's going, feeling a bit disconnected.

And in the first scene, she's out at a club with some friends, some old school friends, and she's sort of regretting the choice to go out.

She's feeling just a bit over life, really.

But all of that turns around when she meets a young gentleman by the name of Jamie.

told from the perspective of D.S.

Whitworth, and he is overseeing the reclamation of her body from a river in a town called Widringham, which I think is fictional, but seems to be in the north of England.

Well, I think from the perspective of the reader,

He is very lackadaisical about the whole situation.

Essentially, he automatically assumes it's suicide.

And to be fair, the evidence does seem to back that up.

There are no signs of struggle.

It seems that she's thrown herself into the river off a bridge upriver.

But the other thing that he does is be quite judgmental of poor Katie and of

young women like her, I think.

He sort of put me in mind of Jackson Brody, who's the out-of-touch jaded cop in Kate Atkinson's crime novels, particularly Case Studies, her first one.

He feels for Katie, but he tends to be a little bit dismissive of perhaps her as a person, is how I read it, at least.

Well, I think what's really spectacular about the way that Moore has structured this book is that we have a singular story, and that's Katie's that's split over these two timelines, but we're also given alternative perspectives from

on Katie's situation, but also on the experience of being a domestic violence survivor by these other women who were in the women's refuge where Katie worked.

They're all quite diverse women.

There's a South Asian woman who's also queer, a wealthier white woman who insists that her husband never actually hit her and that it was more of a psychological abuse situation.