This is a decent, atmospheric thriller with an interesting protagonist, Hannah. It's clever and well written, entertainingly poking fun at well-heeled Brits behaving badly in the sun.

Christopher Fowler is a good writer, making it an above-average good holiday read (soak it up beside the pool but watch out for broken glass).

I enjoyed visiting the south of France for a holiday by the pool, but so many of the characters behaved bizarrely (and in some cases cartoonishly evilly) that I couldn't quite sustain my belief in their actions. By the time we got to the end and found out what had happened, it didn't seem important any more.

A fun way to pass the time as a beach read, but not as good as the Bryant & May books for me.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

3,5* upped to 4
This is a good thriller featuring a cast of unlikeable characters and constant sense of doom plut the usual Christopher Fowler humour.
I think a great part of the rating is due to expectations: even if I read and enjoyed stories that weren't Bryant&May this was the first after the end of the series and I was expecting something different.
I like how the character were developed and how they were unlikeable. I also loved the dark humour which is always present.
The thriller was average, a bit to slow to keep me on the edge till the end.
I'm sure that my rate would be better if I was going to read it next year.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I’m afraid I was disappointed in Hot Water. Like many others, I suspect, I read it because I love the Bryant & May books, but this isn’t anything like as good. It’s a serviceable psychological thriller, but it felt pretty generic to me, with little to distinguish it from the slew of others in the genre.

Set near Nice, a long, rather disjointed set-up gives us Hannah enrolling as a maid for a shabby company servicing expensive holiday villas for the rich a job for which she is plainly too well educated and too mature. A middle-aged man sends Summer, his teenage mistress, to stay there for a week until he arrives to see her for a while before his wife and son join him. Hannah befriends Summer, and we learn something of their histories and characters but there are sinister developments leading to a mystery.

If this seems a very vague outline, it’s because it takes about a quarter of the book to get to this point and to say any more would therefore be a spoiler for a significant portion of the book – although for some while it’s fairly plain what will happen next. Frankly, I found it all rather plodding and Fowler’s development of suspense is so laboured, with pages and pages of things maybe moving in the bushes, noises that were probably just an animal and so on, that I began to feel patronised and to get rather annoyed.

I didn’t think things improved much as the book developed. It all felt rather standard, run-of-the-mill Tense Psychological Thriller stuff and I wasn’t really engaged. The problem is that without the brilliant elements of character and history which make Bryant & May so good, this just felt very ordinary to me.

I’m genuinely sorry to be so critical of an author whose other work I love, but this wasn’t for me. The psychological thriller isn’t a genre I generally like and I only tried this because it’s Fowler. Fans of the genre may like it much more, but personally I can’t recommend it.

(My thanks to Titan Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

3.5 stars

A new Fowler book is always a good thing, and this stand alone is definitely entertaining.
Filled to the brim with unlikeable characters, there's one stand alone nice female, trying to find out what happened to her friend.
The waters are muddied quite a bit along the way, so that it's not so much a whodunnit, but a what happened????

Keeps you on your toes right to last page.

I’m struggling to review this as I am a big fan of Christopher Fowler, in fact the collection of Bryant and May books would be my desert island choice. The reasons I am such a fan are that the writing is so intelligent, the background settings are so well researched that they are almost a love letter to London and the fact that all the characters are three dimensional and leap off the page at you. None of these things are in this book, which could have been written by any domestic noir author. I found it dreary and really didn’t care about any of the characters. I wish I could say I liked it, but I promised an honest review.

I really enjoyed this fast paced, tense and atmospheric thriller. it was well written with a gripping and engaging storyline and well developed characters. It was twisty and unpredictable and had me on the edge of my seat. I loved it.

This is a standalone psychological thriller from Christopher Fowler, and I should warn fans of his Bryant and May series that it is nothing like that series, although there is a strong element of black humour that runs through this. 23 year old Hannah Carreras has escaped her traumatic past in England and has run to the South of France, where she manages to secure a post as a cleaner for numerous villas, located near Nice, managing to persuade a reluctant Julia Martinez to employ her, despite it obviously being a position well below her abilities. She is instructed to maintain a silence and invisibility when it comes to those staying in villas, a rule she breaks almost immediately when she meets the bored beautiful wild child , 18 year old Summer Farrow, a young woman keen on experiencing all that life offers, staying for a week at the remote Lavardin Villa.

A lonely Summer had been expecting to spend her time with the married Steve Elsbury, an older man married to Jennifer and with a uncommunicative teenage son, Jamie, who hero worships his father. However, Steve, working in the wine trade, has not been able to come, and is only able to arrive on Summer's last day, leaving them with only a few hours to spend together. His second in command, the posh but ineffectual Giles Sutherland comes on the same day with his sly and manipulative wife, Melissa, they are joined by Jennifer and Jamie. Unable to contact Summer, whose possessions are littered throughout the villa, Hannah is concerned about her disappearance, which along with other evidence, convinces her that something terrible has happened to Summer. She watches and observes everyone closely at the villa, where there are increasing tensions, the British are not welcomed by the local community where a child goes missing. Will Hannah discover the truth about Summer?

Fowler provides the requisite elements that comprise a psychological thriller, a cast of characters that are mostly unlikeable, an atmosphere of rising suspense, plenty of red herrings, and where numerous secrets, lies and deceptions slowly begin to emerge, and I have to say it is probably well nigh impossible for the reader to deduce the truth. The author documents how the lives of those staying at the villa begin to fray and spiral out of their control, the underlying conflicts and feelings rising to the surface, as events take an even darker turn. Many of Fowler's fans, and those who love the psychological thriller genre are likely to enjoy this. Thanks to the publisher for an ARC.