‘Dead In The Water’ is the sequel to ‘Please Don't Leave Me Here’. Can you read this without having read PDLMH first? Probably not. There are too many back stories and motivations that require a knowledge of what went before.
Bridgette has relocated from inner city Melbourne to her Grandparents old house on Raymond Island situated in the Gippsland lakes. ( https://tinyurl.com/lr8peck )
Isolated doesn't mean you can escape from your past. Three years have passed. Bridgett has married Detective Senior Sergeant Aiden, colleague of her first husband Sam, and they have a young daughter Ella to go with nine year old twins Phoebe and Finn from her first marriage. Sam was a detective in Melbourne and was fatally stabbed in an altercation in Chapel Street. Aiden is recovering from being shot in drug raid that went horribly wrong. His partner died and the shooter was also fatally shot. Relationships with detectives are fraught with angst.

Bridgette is starting to manage her many issues when her past comes back to throw her life into turmoil. Her old boyfriend Matt Elery has written another of his detective novels. This one is set in a fishing village on the lakes in Gippsland where the body of wife of the local detective is dragged from the lake. Bridgette’s issues with Matt resurfacing after all this time become more complicated when the plot of his novel starts to mirror real life.

Told from Bridgette’s POV Chandler successfully captures her turmoil and struggle with her past, her deteriorating marriage, and the increasing nagging feeling that the murder of the women in the lake is somehow connected to her.

The tension builds as the props that support her are one by one knocked away. The ending is a true surprise and is skillfully played out without the need for endless exposition to explain how we got there. ( )

Do a quick search on any of the book reading community websites and you're going to find a large number of novels called "Dead in The Water", adding to the feeling that there's something nicely tongue in cheek about the title of Tania Chandler's second novel also being the title of a crime novel within the story. That sort of echo is loosely reflected in elements of the internal novel and the troubled life of central character Brigitte and her husband in the ... main novel for want of a better description.

Brigitte and her policeman husband Aidan were introduced to readers in Chandler's debut novel PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME HERE. If you'd offered odds on them being part of an ongoing series it's doubtful you'd have gotten many takers, and yet, here they are, working incredibly well in this second outing.

With multi-layered connections between Brigitte and the author of the internal novel, the slight echoes of storylines between the internal and main novels are also reflected when the body of a well known celebrity chef is found. Brigitte is peripherally involved as part of the day job, eventually more closely intertwined as she appears to be in danger as well. Meanwhile Aidan is off being paranoid and erratic about a whole lot of things, meaning that DEAD IN THE WATER is part character study, part exploration of the pressures of marrying a cop and part thriller. There are obvious lines to be drawn here about PTSD into the bargain - with both partners not having really dealt with events from the earlier book.

With the careful use of flashback and memory recall, Chandler has written a second novel that could be read without the benefit of the first in the series. Both books are, however, essentially studies of past trauma, and the effect that has on characters present and future behaviour. Because of that, reading them both would considerably enhance the reader's sense of connection, and frustration with both partners in this complicated and complex personal web.

Whilst you'd definitely call these character study novels, that's not to imply that plot, or even sense of place take a secondary seat. The use of the internal novel is an interesting device, cleverly employed, avoiding pitfalls and potential clichés. Using the setting of a sheltered little island community, disconnected from the mainland, isolated and vaguely disconcerting works without screaming closed room at you. Even when approaching them as character studies, these are not always likeable people. They fail, recover, act bravely and idiotically, they frustrate and annoy. They are also unexpectedly sympathetic and always extremely real.

All in all DEAD IN THE WATER is an interesting second novel, and anyone taking bets on a third featuring these characters would probably shorten the odds at a rapid rate of knots after reading it.

https://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-dead-water-tania-chandler-0 ( )

Any Australian my age will surely remember the 70’s advertising campaign for a non-alcoholic mixer called Claytons: the drink you have when you’re not having a drink. To me DEAD IN THE WATER feels like the crime fiction you have when you’re not having crime fiction. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but in this instance I thought it made the book a bit bland; unsure of what it wanted to be. Although there is a crime it doesn’t really drive the story or any of the characters and I didn’t feel that the psychological suspense was moving things along either. In fact there wasn’t much moving along of any kind. To me this novel reads more like literary fiction in that it is primarily an exploration of one human being’s life and the stuff that happens in it is less important than how the subject feels about and reacts to those life events. Except for the last dozen or so pages where there is action a-plenty. Again this is not a bad approach in itself but the issue I had with it in this instance is that I didn’t find the book’s subject – the tragedy-packed life of Brigitte Serra – all that compelling.

The book is Tania Chandler’s second novel to centre on this character. I haven’t read the earlier instalment but didn’t feel at a disadvantage for that, with Chandler providing just enough information about previously described events for me not to feel out of the loop but not, I think, too much that those who have read the earlier novel will be bored by the repetition. But even without me having read them both, I cannot fail to notice that this supposedly average suburban mum has had enough traumatic life events to fill two books (so far) and I struggled somewhat with that fact. I know that all the reading I do requires me to suspend my disbelief but I couldn’t get past the mental hurdle that an average sort of person, even one who makes poor decisions on occasion, is unlikely to encounter all the horrendous things that have happened to Brigitte (who’s only in her 30’s by my reckoning). A car accident that nearly killed her and caused amnesia, being suspected of murder, one dead boyfriend (or maybe he was a fiancé?), one dead husband and a nearly-dead second husband are among the traumas Brigitte has experienced before this book starts. And in this one there’s a family member’s death, another’s attempted suicide and more that I can’t reveal for fear of spoilers. Which is how it came to pass that I never really ‘bought’ her character. And even if I had, the exploration of her dealing with these events was basically to watch her get drunk and wish she hadn’t (that’s Brigitte wishing she hadn’t, not me doing the wishing).

Brigitte is married to Aiden, a former homicide detective who, due to the events depicted in the first book which included him being shot, is now performing more routine police duties in eastern Victoria. They live with Brigitte’s twins from her first marriage and their own daughter Ella on Raymond Island: a small strip of land accessible only from the water in the Gippsland lakes. When a woman’s body is found on the island Aiden is only tangentially involved in the investigation of her death as detectives are sent from Melbourne to take charge but because the community is such a small one everyone is interested in events and in what insider knowledge the Serra family has of the investigation. But they, and we readers, are largely disappointed as there is never much provided in the way of investigatory detail or progress in the case. Instead the book focuses more on how Brigitte and her family are adapting to their new life – I gather some years have passed since the events of the first book – and how Brigitte and Aiden are coping (or not) with all life has thrown at them. For me there are missed opportunities here. For example I thought it pretty obvious what was wrong with Aiden and would like that to have come to light earlier so that the issue could have been explored more thoroughly rather than being hurriedly crammed into the final couple of chapters of the book.

Chandler has written publicly of her uncomfortableness with her writing’s categorisation and heaven knows I have lamented too strict genre labelling. Isn’t a book just a book in the end? Perhaps my hackles rose because it felt a little like the book was making a play for being better than standard crime fiction by not conforming to the tropes of the genre.The most obvious manifestation of this is when Brigitte starts critiquing a crime novel that’s part of the story, written by an old boyfriend of hers. After the third or fourth sneering jibe about the genre’s clichés I couldn’t help but think “pot, meet kettle, it’s not like the ‘young woman in repeated jeopardy’ is uncharted territory.”

Ultimately I found DEAD IN THE WATER equally readable and forgettable. for me the genre elements (what there were of them) too obvious and, aside from the beautifully captured sense of place, the literary elements of the novel lacking much in the way of insight into the human condition. But of course I read through the eyes of a die-hard fan of the crime genre; perhaps this is a book better suited to those whose preferences lie elsewhere.