Yet another promising book on my TBR bites the dust. Like many of the books I’ve read this year, The Night Swim wasn’t bad, per se. It just wasn’t good. Why?

The characters are flat. Rachel has no emotional range; even when she gets upset, it barely scratches the surface. Hannah, for the majority of the story, is only seen via flowery letters that sound like a novelist wrote them, rather than a real person. I couldn’t even work up much sympathy for Jenny, who goes through a terrible ordeal, over and over again. The only character whose emotions were palpable was Kelly, and that might have been a bit over the top.

The story has no real urgency and is nowhere near a thriller. The story has a dual timeline, but neither story is compelling enough to stand on its own. Rachel herself can’t even pick one to focus on, as she jumps back and forth between investigating the past and the present simultaneously. I kept wanting to shake her and ask her what her priorities were. Even at the end, during the big reveal, I felt like there was no danger. And disappointingly, the podcast sections did not add anything to the story, and definitely did not make me feel like a member of the jury. I can only hope that these sections were meant to be excerpts of the full episode.

There are continuity issues and errors in logic. A florist who is one minute searching through customer files on the computer, then snipping rose stems, and then she’s back on the computer. Rachel’s phone falls in the water, and then a few minutes later, she’s making a phone call. Why can’t Rachel check her own email to look for messages from Hannah? Even if she can’t, why must Pete go through the hundreds of emails one by one, rather than typing her name in the search box? And how did Hannah track Rachel down when her photo isn’t readily available to the public, and why was no one concerned that this unbalanced woman was stalking her?!

I had a hard time suspending my disbelief. Rachel encountered exactly no pushback to her inquiries. Everyone was more than willing to talk to her, and just babbled on and on when questioned. One source even gave her the home address of another person so she could just pop over and interrogate her. That. Would never. Happen. It was entirely too easy for her to get to the truth, which may be part of why the payoff at the end fell flat. She didn’t earn it.

The writing is clunky, repetitive, and uninspired. The phrase “show, don’t tell” may be trite advice, but I think the author needs to hear it again. Characters’ actions, speech, gestures, etc. are described from Rachel’s perspective and then interpreted in great detail, rather than standing on their own: The defense attorney who intentionally spilled water on himself…to humanize himself to the jurors. The judge who glares at the media section of the courtroom…because he hates journalists. There is no room for readers to draw their own conclusions; the author tells them exactly what they should see and think.

And the Australian author apparently didn’t think it would be necessary to ask an American to read her manuscript before publishing. There are a number of terms used that would not be used in America: “complainant” instead of “plaintiff,” for instance. That’s fine if the story takes place in Australia, but it takes place in the U.S. Where was the editor?

All that said, I do want to acknowledge that this book does tackle some very tough subjects: Sexual assault, rape, and the politics surrounding them; how divisive it is, when it should be black and white; how victims are victimized over and over again. The descriptions are, at times, graphic, but not gratuitously so. (As a novelist who has written about the subject myself, I know it is very difficult to do—so I do have to give the author credit for that.) In that sense, it did feel like the author was putting the reader “in the jury box.”

I did read the book within the space of a few days, while on vacation. I didn’t have any other books with me, so I persisted. Can’t say I’m glad I read it, but it was at least a quick, entertaining read.