Something in the Water: Reese's Book Club: A Novel

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ; A shocking discovery on a honeymoon in paradise changes the lives of a picture-perfect couple in this taut psychological thriller debut—for readers of Ruth Ware, Paula Hawkins, and Shari Lapena.

“A psychological thriller that captivated me from page one. What unfolds makes for a wild, page-turning ride! It’s the perfect beach read!”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine book pick)

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY GLAMOUR AND NEWSWEEK

If you could make one simple choice that would change your life forever, would you?

Erin is a documentary filmmaker on the brink of a professional breakthrough, Mark a handsome investment banker with big plans. Passionately in love, they embark on a dream honeymoon to the tropical island of Bora Bora, where they enjoy the sun, the sand, and each other. Then, while scuba diving in the crystal blue sea, they find something in the water. . . .

Could the life of your dreams be the stuff of nightmares?

Suddenly the newlyweds must make a dangerous choice: to speak out or to protect their secret. After all, if no one else knows, who would be hurt? Their decision will trigger a devastating chain of events. . . .

Have you ever wondered how long it takes to dig a grave?

Wonder no longer. Catherine Steadman’s enthralling voice shines throughout this spellbinding debut novel. With piercing insight and fascinating twists, Something in the Water challenges the reader to confront the hopes we desperately cling to, the ideals we’re tempted to abandon, and the perfect lies we tell ourselves.

Praise for Something in the Water

“Superbly written, clever and gripping.”—B. A. Paris, New York Times bestselling author of Behind Closed Doors

“Deliciously dramatic.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Thrilling . . . the perfect beach read.”—PopSugar

“A dark glittering gem of a thriller.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Arresting . . . deftly paced, elegantly chilly . . . [Catherine] Steadman brings . . . wit, timing and intelligence to this novel. . . . Something in the Water is a proper page-turner.”—The New York TimesAge Range: Adult

Review

“Deliciously dramatic.”—Entertainment Weekly

“The perfect beach read . . . Unreliable characters and a plot packed with twists will keep you guessing until the final, thrilling page.”—PopSugar

“With unreliable characters, wry voices, exquisite pacing, and a twisting plot, Steadman potently draws upon her acting chops. . . . A darkly glittering gem of a thriller from a new writer to watch.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Captivating . . . daring . . . The threats and increasingly bad decisions accelerate with Bourne-like velocity. . . . Steadman [is] a newcomer worth watching.”—Publishers Weekly

“This debut’s opening hook, which jumps ahead in the story to reveal a shocking outcome, teamed with Erin’s spunk and the threat of Russian mobsters, creates irresistible suspense—of both the what-will-happen and the how-did-that-happen varieties.”—Booklist

“An unbearably tense debut with a knockout premise, Something in the Water had me hooked from the very first sentence. Thrilling and thought-provoking, it’s the perfect beach read. I devoured it!”—Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Final Girls

“This is a book that puts you right into the shoes of the characters and has you asking: What would I do? You may find yourself increasingly uncomfortable with your answers. An unputdownable story that poses the age-old question of how well we can ever know someone else—and, perhaps even more important, how well do we know ourselves?”—Amy Engel, author of The Roanoke Girls

“We all think we know our own boundaries. We all think we’d do the right thing. But what if the opportunity for the perfect crime appeared right in front of your eyes? How many rules would you break in pursuit of the perfect life? Catherine Steadman’s debut novel, Something in the Water, is as scary as it gets. This terrifying morality tale is guaranteed to keep you up at night.”—Michelle Richmond, New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Pact

“Pure adrenaline: I swallowed this book whole.”—Erin Kelly, author of He Said/She Said

“I absolutely loved Something in the Water, a stunning debut. . . . Superbly written, clever and gripping.”—B. A. Paris, New York Times bestselling author of Behind Closed Doors and The Breakdown

“As frightening as it is funny, Something in the Water feels like a thriller for our times, a caper with a dark heart.”—Louise Candlish, author of The Swimming Pool and Our House

“A taut and smart thriller, Something in the Water is a fast-paced examination of the slippery slope and precariousfoundations our middle-class lives are built on, and a sensitive examination of a marriage under pressure. Catherine Steadman is a genuinely unique voice in crime fiction.”—Gillian McAllister, author of Everything but the Truth and Anything You Do Say

“Brilliant.”—Catherine Isaac, author of You Me Everything

About the Author

Catherine Steadman is an actress and writer based in North London, UK. She has appeared in leading roles on British television as well as on stage in the West End. In 2016 she was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in Oppenheimer. She is best known in the United States for her role as Mabel Lane Fox in Downton Abbey. She grew up in the New Forest, UK, and lives with a small dog and an average-sized man. Something in the Water is her first novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Saturday, October 1

The Grave

Have you ever wondered how long it takes to dig a grave? Wonder no longer. It takes an age. However long you think it takes, double that.

I’m sure you’ve seen it in movies: the hero, gun to his head perhaps, as he sweats and grunts his way deeper and deeper into the earth until he’s standing six feet down in his own grave. Or the two hapless crooks who argue and quip in the hilarious madcap chaos as they shovel frantically, dirt flying skyward with cartoonish ease.

It’s not like that. It’s hard. Nothing about it is easy. The ground is solid and heavy and slow. It’s so fucking hard.

And it’s boring. And long. And it has to be done.

The stress, the adrenaline, the desperate animal need to do it, sustains you for about twenty minutes. Then you crash.

Your muscles yawn against the bones in your arms and legs. Skin to bone, bone to skin. Your heart aches from the aftermath of the adrenal shock, your blood sugar drops, you hit the wall. A full-body hit. But you know, you know with crystal clarity, that high or low, exhausted or not, that hole’s getting dug.

Then you kick into another gear. It’s that halfway point in a marathon when the novelty has worn off and you’ve just got to finish the joyless bloody thing. You’ve invested; you’re all in. You’ve told all your friends you’d do it, you made them pledge donations to some charity or other, one you have only a vague passing connection to. They guiltily promised more money than they really wanted to give, feeling obligated because of some bike ride or other they might have done at university, the details of which they bore you with every time they get drunk. I’m still talking about the marathon, stick with me. And then you went out every evening, on your own, shins throbbing, headphones in, building up miles, for this. So that you can fight yourself, fight with your body, right there, in that moment, in that stark moment, and see who wins. And no one but you is watching. And no one but you really cares. It’s just you and yourself trying to survive. That is what digging a grave feels like, like the music has stopped but you can’t stop dancing. Because if you stop dancing, you die.

So you keep digging. You do it, because the alternative is far worse than digging a never-ending fucking hole in the hard compacted soil with a shovel you found in some old man’s shed.

As you dig you see colors drift across your eyes: phosphenes caused by metabolic stimulation of neurons in the visual cortex due to low oxygenation and low glucose. Your ears roar with blood: low blood pressure caused by dehydration and overexertion. But your thoughts? Your thoughts skim across the still pool of your consciousness, only occasionally glancing the surface. Gone before you can grasp them. Your mind is completely blank. The central nervous system treats this overexertion as a fight-or-flight situation; exercise-induced neurogenesis, along with that ever-popular sports mag favorite, “exercise-induced endorphin release,” acts to both inhibit your brain and protect it from the sustained pain and stress of what you are doing.

Exhaustion is a fantastic emotional leveler. Running or digging.

Around the forty-five-minute mark I decide six feet is an unrealistic depth for this grave. I will not manage to dig down to six feet. I’m five foot six. How would I even climb out? I would literally have dug myself into a hole.

According to a 2014 YouGov survey, five foot six is the ideal height for a British woman. Apparently that is the height that the average British man would prefer his partner to be. So, lucky me. Lucky Mark. God, I wish Mark were here.

So if I’m not digging six feet under, how far under? How deep is deep enough?

Bodies tend to get found because of poor burial. I don’t want that to happen. I really don’t. That would definitely not be the outcome I’m after. And a poor burial, like a poor anything else really, comes down to three things:

1. Lack of time

2. Lack of initiative

3. Lack of care

In terms of time: I have three to six hours to do this. Three hours is my conservative estimate. Six hours is the daylight I have left. I have time.

I believe I have initiative; two brains are better than one. I hope. I just need to work through this step by step.

And number three: care? God, do I care. I care. More than I have ever cared in my entire life.

|||

Three feet is the minimum depth recommended by the ICCM (Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management). I know this because I Googled it. I Googled it before I started digging. See, initiative. Care. I squatted down next to the body, wet leaves and mud malty underfoot, and I Googled how to bury a body. I Googled this on the body’s burner phone. If they do find the body . . . they won’t find the body . . . and manage to retrieve the data . . . they won’t retrieve the data . . . then this search history is going to make fantastic reading.

Two full hours in, I stop digging. The hole is just over three feet deep. I don’t have a tape measure, but I remember that three feet is around crotch height. The height of the highest jump I managed on the horse-riding vacation I took before I left for university twelve years ago. An eighteenth-birthday present. Weird what sticks in the memory, isn’t it? But here I am, waist-deep in a grave, remembering a gymkhana. I got second prize, by the way. I was very happy with it.

Anyway, I’ve dug approximately three feet deep, two feet wide, six feet long. Yes, that took two hours.

To reiterate: digging a grave is very hard.

Just to put this into perspective for you, this hole, my two-hour hole, is: 3 ft x 2 ft x 6 ft, which is 36 cubic feet of soil, which is 1 cubic meter of soil, which is 1.5 tons of soil. And that—that—is the weight of a hatchback car or a fully grown beluga whale or the average hippopotamus. I have moved the equivalent of that up and slightly to the left of where it was before. And this grave is only three feet deep.

I look across the mud at the mound and slowly hoist myself out, forearms trembling under my own weight. The body lies across from me under a torn tarpaulin, its brilliant cobalt a slash of color against the brown forest floor. I’d found it abandoned, hanging like a veil from a branch, back toward the layby, in quiet communion with an abandoned fridge. The fridge’s small freezer-box door creaking calmly in the breeze. Dumped.

There’s something so sad about abandoned objects, isn’t there? Desolate. But kind of beautiful. I suppose, in a sense, I’ve come to abandon a body.

The fridge has been here a while—I know this because I saw it from the car window as we drove past here three months ago, and nobody has come for it yet. We were on our way back to London from Norfolk, Mark and I, after celebrating our anniversary, and here the fridge still is months later. Odd to think so much has happened—to me, to us—in that time, but nothing has changed here. As if this spot were adrift from time, a holding area. It has that feel. Perhaps no one has been here since the fridge owner was here, and God knows how long ago that might have been. The fridge looks distinctly seventies—you know, in that bricky way. Bricky, Kubricky. A monolith in a damp English wood. Obsolete. Three months it’s been here at least and no collection, no men from the dump. No one comes here, that’s clear. Except us. No council workers, no disgruntled locals to write letters to the council, no early morning dog walkers to stumble across my quarry. This was the safest place I could think of. So here we are. It will take a while for it all to settle, the soil. But I think the fridge and I have enough time.

I look it over, the crumpled-tarp mound. Underneath lie flesh, skin, bone, teeth. Three and a half hours dead.

I wonder if he’s still warm. My husband. Warm to the touch. I Google it. Either way, I don’t want the shock.

Okay.

Okay, the arms and legs should be cold to the touch but the main body will still be warm. Okay then.

I take a long, full exhalation.

Okay, here we go. . . .

I stop. Wait.

I don’t know why, but I clear his burner phone’s search history. It’s pointless, I know; the phone’s untraceable and after a couple of hours in the damp October ground it won’t work anyway. But then, maybe it will. I place the burner back in his coat pocket and slip his personal iPhone out of his chest pocket. It’s on airplane mode.

I look through the photo library. Us. Tears well and then streak in two hot dribbles down my face.

I fully remove the tarp, exposing everything it conceals. I wipe the phone for prints, return it to its warm chest pocket, and brace my knees to drag.

I’m not a bad person. Or maybe I am. Maybe you should decide?

But I should definitely explain. And to explain I need to go back. Back to that anniversary morning, three months ago.

Review:

4.0 out of 5

80.00% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. Please write more.

S. · June 23, 2018

4.0 out of 5 stars Spoiler-good summer read, but annoying details

K. · May 29, 2025

Do not read if you don’t want spoilers!Overall I enjoyed the book, I took a star away because I, like others got irritated with some of their/Erins impulsive and dumb actions…although it worked out in the end. However author did a great job with the story as I found myself taking on the anxiety of some of Erin’s poor decisions.But spoilers; why did they not just throw the gun, phone and the usb back in the water at the wreckage site? Why did they have to sell all the diamonds at one time?…..those were the silly things I rolled my eyes at while reading

3.0 out of 5 stars Woman makes stupid mistakes until she gets caught

D. · April 14, 2025

Something in the water reviewI have read CS before I loved The Family Game. I was looking forward to this book and her beautiful voice in audiobook form.This character makes mistake after mistake and expects the reader to sympathize. The amount of plot armor she has is amazing.You could retitle the book “Woman makes stupid mistakes until she gets caught.” I guess she’s untouchable throughout the story so why not be reckless.I did like how they explained the receipts of the ending. It felt kind of sudden so much so I almost didn’t believe it was true. It was almost to predictable, too much of a sudden thought jump from the main character. It made the ending actually make sense now that the main character learned from all her mistakes…in a way.The amount of unanswered questions and unfinished trails is crazy too. All of them distractions from the main story. The plane, the files, what the people wanted. None of it was answered.

5.0 out of 5 stars TERRIFIC! A grand read about a "lucky" find! 5-STARS PLUS!

H.S. · June 12, 2018

I absolutely LOVED this book - all parts of it - all the bits - were fun. I loved hearing about vacationing on BoraBora (I wanna go!) - I loved the voice of Erin (main protagonist), who tells the story through a slightly quirky first-person point of view. I enjoyed reading about her obvious missteps too (she always ignored me when I hollered: "NO! Don't do THAT!") And usually, I dislike a prologue, but this time it really worked. The characters were all terrific and well rounded. Eddie the jailed mobster was a favorite!This is the story of Erin & Mark, a young couple who met, fell in love, and are planning their wedding, when Mark loses his job. This is upsetting news for the couple, and especially for Mark, who had a very well paying job that would cover the lion's share of their home expenses and post-wedding plans. He is frustrated in his job hunting. The couple's planned wedding extravaganza is scaled down quite a bit, and the honeymooners opt for two weeks in beautiful, tropical BoraBora, instead of three.The writing is so good, it is almost magical! It brings everything to life! Even details of Erin's novice scuba diving were marvelous to read! The couple is clearly in love, and they enjoy the grueling adventures of BoraBora as they honeymoon together--climbing, hiking, swimming -- and boating. And on a return sail from a coral reef back to their accommodations, something bangs against their boat.OK - they find something that changes everything. But I won't go too much farther into the plot, as I don't want to spoil the story and its surprises. But here is where the thrills really start, with a discovery of the object in the water. Hmmmm.......Back home, Erin resumes her job. She is filming a documentary of three jailed convicts who are soon to be released. She wants to interview the three and film them in their new lives, once they have attained freedom. But complications arise when Erin can't control her own surges of curiosity. Meanwhile, jobless Mark is now dashing about, trying to establish his own independent firm. Erin and Mark are almost like ships passing in the night; they find that most of their communication is now via text. Meanwhile, Erin is convinced that she is being followed and watched - by police? - or by something to do with the package in the water?But Erin tries to move forward with her documentary. Her taped & filmed conversations with gangster "Eddie" seem to be getting quite familiar, when he asks her to turn off the camera. Then, he appeals to her - to do him a favor. Erin, true to her nature as already established, says YES, as long as Eddie will do a favor for her in return. Eddie's character is marvelous! The author has painted such grand pictures of the characters that people this story! They are real--!!I can't believe that this was a debut novel--the writing is just so so so good! Also, the author is an actress from the cast of Downton Abbey! How much talent can one person have? This is a marvelous book, and I would recommend it to .... everyone! Read and enjoy!

4.0 out of 5 stars Fast paced but left me with questions

A. · June 3, 2025

I read this because of Reese Witherspoon's book club. The story of a documentary filmmaker who stumbles with her new husband on a fortune. As they try to figure out what to do, Erin learns that not all is as it seems.

Disappointing and so so long

A.C. · June 21, 2021

The last part

J. · March 31, 2025

After speed reading the first 65% of the book, we finally get to some action and adventure. I enjoyed, therefore, the last 35% of the book. But it is a twisting, turning adventure for sure.

Unterhaltsamer und spannender, nicht immer logischer Thriller

R. · August 7, 2018

Ich lese relativ wenig Thriller, aber da ich Cat Steadman als Schauspielerin kannte, habe ich mir ihren Bestseller besorgt, und bin sehr angenehm überrascht worden.Ein wenig erinnerte mich das Ganze an Hitchcock Filme. Alles fängt harmlos und banal an, ein Paar plant Hochzeit und Flitterwochen. Die unerwartete Arbeitslosigkeit des Ehemannes trübt etwas die Freude, die Traum Flitterwochen werden halt etwas verkürzt. Ein unerwarteter Fund bringt dann eine Geschichte ins Rollen, bei der nichts mehr so bleibt wie es war.Wie bei vielen anderen Büchern dieser Art bleibt die Logik manchmal auf der Strecke, und manches ist einfach nicht realistisch. Dennoch, unter dem Strich bleibt eine spannende und unterhaltsame Lektüre, bei der sich die Autorin auch vor dem 'F-Wort' nicht scheut.

Riveting

S. · July 26, 2018

Keeps u entertained will the very end.Would defiantly recommend it, you can identify with the main character!Great book.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

L. · February 20, 2025

Just took a chance on this book as I had never read anything before from this author but she had me from page one. This is the only way to start a book. Great narrative. lots of twists and turns and she keeps you guessing right up to the surprise ending. I will definitely buying her books again and again.

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Something in the Water: Reese's Book Club: A Novel

Name: Something in the Water: Reese's Book Club: A Novel
Brand: Ballantine Books
SKU: U1524797677
Price: 81.91 AED
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Rating: 4 (10 reviews)

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