A worker finds tiny bones, the bones of an infant long buried, when excavating an East London backyard for a development project. Thus begins Fiona Barton’s second psychological thriller. After the success of Barton’s bestselling and finely wrought first book, The Widow, readers have high expectations for The Child, a story that once again features Kate Waters, a thorough and “old school” reporter who has a winsome way with people. In this novel Kate’s personality and background are more developed, though the mystery remains front and center.

Spurred by a small article mentioning the gruesome discovery of the baby’s bones, Waters decides to investigate. She wants to know who buried the baby and what kind of sordid, desperate circumstances would prompt such an action. Three other key female characters also see the article and Water’s subsequent reports detailing her investigation.

One of these women, Angela, gave birth to a child in 1970 who was kidnapped from her hospital room while Angela showered. The baby was never found, and Angela is convinced the recently unearthed child is her baby girl. She tells the police and Waters what she believes. While waiting for ultimate confirmation, the story undulates and ripples with frisson. Barton again uses multiple points of view shifting between Waters, Angela and two other women—a mother and daughter—to create a continuous story line.

The mother and daughter have a solid connection to East London, but seemingly not to Angela or the baby. With Water’s skillful, empathetic questioning, she begins to recreate the events of long ago, right down to a 1980s disco-themed reunion of the residents of the block where the worker found the remains. Barton’s stories ring with authenticity as she, like Waters, has 30 years of experience in journalism. Barton fulfills all expectations in this installment: The Child resoundly delivers.

"I couldn’t put it down!" It’s an old cliché, often used to describe a book that achieves an immediate and constant hold—so much so that a reader can consume it in close to one sitting—no matter what the hour or how many chores need to be done.

Lately, such addictive reads seem to be few and far between, with many simply trying to up the ante on gore or the twist surprise factor, and most merely end up leveling the playing field.

At last, though, here’s a book that fits the bill. I Found You is addictive, and it doesn’t insult your believability quotient.

British author Lisa Jewell has penned 13 previous novels, including the creepy The Girls in the Garden (2016). In I Found You, Jewell combines several ongoing plots; all three of the storylines she’s imagined here stand on their own with intriguing characters, while at the same time seductively weaving one cloth. These stories are set in motion at differing times and places, but sooner or later they converge in a funky English seaside town called Ridinghouse Bay.

A man sits on the beach in the pouring rain: staring out to sea; soaked to the skin; silent. A middle-aged single mother sees him as she gazes from her cottage window.

Near London, a young newlywed from Kiev discovers that her husband of three weeks has gone missing. Without any new friends or understanding of British culture, she must somehow set the wheels in motion in order to discover what’s happened.

In a decades-past flashback, two teens on holiday with their family encounter an older teen who raises their suspicions in a hair-raising fashion. The scene unfolds during a visit to the beach by a traveling vintage “steam fair” (a showcase of steam-powered vehicles and machinery) that provides an appropriately seedy feel to the proceedings.

Each of these finely drawn stories tends more to gloom than to creepiness, but Jewell’s skill is such that an overriding sense of menace seeps into every page, overriding the commonplace feel of the setting. The action reaches a climax at a once-lovely seaside mansion, now overgrown with neglect—its path leading to a rusty, padlocked door hiding lonely rooms and seaswept vistas.

Jewell knows how to urge the reader on, but not in a bludgeoning way. Occasionally, the action gets a little too ordered—and perhaps winds up a bit too neatly—but by that time, readers will have enjoyed just about every minute of this captivating read.

Paula Hawkins follows her debut smash, The Girl on the Train, with the twisty and compulsive Into the Water. Told through multiple viewpoints, the story immerses the reader in a complex web of suspense, suspicion and emotional turmoil as her characters wrestle with the recent drowning of a single mother and a teenage girl, their bodies found weeks apart at the bottom of a river known as the Drowning Pool. Both deaths are initially treated as suicides, but doubts and secrets abound, prompting speculation of another cause entirely.

Unlike The Girl on the Train, which alternated narratives from two main characters and, later in the book, a third, Into the Water features more than a dozen storytellers, leaving readers hard-pressed to keep them all straight without a set of flash cards. None of the voices is exactly eager to divulge everything they know, leaving readers to piece together the overarching truth from each chapter. But the deeper readers proceed, the easier it is to be swept away by the assorted voices and the secrets they conceal. Hawkins skillfully delves into the psyche of each character, extracting their feelings, fears and fallacies, slowly ramping up the psychological suspense as she goes.

That said, it’s difficult to discern whose story this actually is. One could argue that the lead character is Jules Abbott, sister of Nel Abbott, who dies at the outset of the book. But you could also argue that Nel’s daughter, Lena, is the novel’s main protagonist. Hawkins keeps you guessing, and in doing so loses some of the emotional impact of creating a single character to root for and sympathize with.

Into the Water is ultimately a story of families mired in secrets and uneasy relationships, haunted by the past and fearful of facing the truth in the present. The book builds slowly, requiring patience above all from readers but with the promise of a more compelling latter half of the book.