Review | Robyn Harding’s latest thriller ‘The Drowning Woman’: flawless in its execution

Vancouver writer Robyn Harding’s thirteenth novel, an unputdownable thriller, centres on two 30-something women in different but equally scary chapters in their lives, and more than satisfies our appetite for thrillers.

We first meet Lee, a failed New York restaurateur, currently living in Seattle, sleeping in her Toyota after fleeing New York, a mountain of debt, and a falling-out with her sister. Getting by with work in a sketchy diner, she showers wherever she can, easing into sleep after her shift. A little booze helps.

Harding’s opening scene is a real gut-wrencher, the kind to strike fear into readers’ hearts. Although armed with a knife — courtesy of friendly vagabonds living on the same quiet street in their Winnebago — Lee endures a frightening attack by meth-fuelled thieves that robs her of money, phone, and ID — with barely time to wheel away from the dirty, crazed hand reaching through the shattered window of her Toyota: the stuff of nightmares. “And just like that, I am nobody.”

Harding’s thriller, flawless in its execution, dives deep into life lived on the margins. Clinging to her standards (no homeless shelters for her) even as her world shrinks around her, Lee next parks her car in a “tony seaside neighbourhood,” under trees, near the Pacific. When the sound of a woman sobbing awakens her, she rushes outside. Enter Hazel, the eponymous drowning woman, whom Lee rescues from a cold Puget Sound. In her wet designer jogging suit and pricey runners, Hazel shares a story of confinement by her sadist husband in their prisonlike home.

She then returns home, appearing at Lee’s car door next morning with breakfast. The women form a bond. Oddly, she also gives Lee a valuable Japanese Netsuke, an antique ivory carving, from her criminal lawyer husband’s large collection. She suggests Lee sell it for cash.

Although acknowledging street life has left her “desperate for connection,” Lee can’t help but be drawn to Hazel’s “effortless elegance,” her “sense of refinement,” while bitterly remembering friends who’d “scurried away like rats” as her career collapsed during COVID. Eventually the new friends hatch a clever, mutually remunerative escape plan, just as a sexy, poetic fitness instructor walks into the diner and into Lee’s life.

Suspicious minds may wonder about these happy coincidences — a wealthy new friend and a romantic guy suddenly appearing in Lee’s rather abject life — but Harding’s writing is both dramatic and subtle, her characters surprisingly devious, and her overriding point about female loneliness and vulnerability rings sadly true.

Not only similar in looks (once Lee is showered and made up), Hazel and Lee share a need for human connection. A relatable, fully fleshed out character, Lee regrets her past bad behaviour — blackmailing her sister’s randy husband to pay her debts was a definite mistake — and she possesses an acute eye that brings her new, downtrodden existence to life.

There’s Randy, her boss at the diner, “short and stocky in his jeans and pale green T-shirt, and he’s sweaty … so sweaty … About fifty, but a hard fifty, his skin thick and grey and lined. His eyes a cold, hard blue.” And here’s Lewis, the generous tipper: “the guy with the gold front tooth and the slash of a scar across his jaw,” who sips Sprite while quietly selling cocaine. People who would have “terrified” Lee in the past, are now “people, just people … doing what they have to do.”

When Hazel takes over the narrative in Part Two, we realize that we’d better hang on tight, for we’re in for a very bumpy ride. In Hazel’s world “people doing what they have to do” assumes new and sinister meanings.

Far from the suffering, sympathetic creature Lee rescued from drowning, Hazel emerges in her true colours. Fuelled by panic and a need to escape marriage to a master of control — a dungeon-like room occupies their basement — Hazel leads us down a terror-filled path. She finds herself in the crosshairs of her husband’s wrath as Harding’s story begins to mimic old Gothic novels, where changes of clothes and hairstyles briefly render women invisible, but never quite safe from evil — rather like the near-disembodied hand reaching for Lee in that unforgettable first scene. There’s wonderful irony in Hazel’s fall (and her education) as she seeks safety in cheap motels and burner phones.

Cleverly told, Harding’s fast-paced tale delivers a timeless portrait of two bids for independence in a tough world, where men hold all the power. Almost.

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