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What Would You Do: The Drowning Woman
178 Plays11 months ago
Brook and Sarah discuss the 2023 release The Drowning Woman by Robyn Harding and what they would do in the main character's situation.
Discussed
The Drowning Woman (2023) Robyn Harding
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Transcript
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Transcript
Introduction and Newsletter
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke. And we both love mystery. Hi Brooke.
00:00:21
Speaker
Hi Sarah, today is another what would you do episode. And if you're a subscriber to our semi-monthly newsletter, you already knew this and maybe you prepared by reading the book so that you'd be able to enjoy the podcast even more. So if this is something you'd like to know what's coming up on the show, make sure you join our newsletter.
00:00:45
Speaker
That's right, Brooke.
Discussion: 'The Drowning Woman'
00:00:46
Speaker
So today we are talking about The Drowning Woman by Robin Harding, and it was published in 2023. So I think this is the first time that we're doing a What Would You Do book that was recently published.
00:01:00
Speaker
So before I jump in, I will just offer a little spoiler warning. We will get into a lot of detail about this book. And there is lots of description of domestic abuse in this book. And I'm sure our conversation will cover that a little bit as well. So when the book opens, we meet Lee, who lives in her car in Seattle. Lee is on the run from unsavory investors in her failed New York restaurant and cut off from her family after trying to blackmail her future brother-in-law.
00:01:32
Speaker
She has to learn how to survive and she defends herself and her few belongings from a thief. She's unharmed but loses much of the money she's been saving for a rental deposit. Instead of settling in her car for the night in a shopping center parking lot, she drives to a wealthy neighborhood where she thinks she will feel safer. After a fitful sleep, she waits to the sound of a woman crying. She realizes that the woman is drowning and without thinking, saves her.
00:01:57
Speaker
Lee goes to work and returns to the same spot to sleep again. The next morning, the woman, Hazel, knocks on Lee's window with breakfast to thank her. The pair quickly form a bond and Hazel reveals that she is in an abusive marriage.
Character Dynamics and Plot Twists
00:02:13
Speaker
Lee has grown ill after rescuing Hazel and, while waiting in an auto body shop for her broken car window to be repaired, a stranger offers her an orange. The next day, the stranger, whose name is Jesse, appears at the diner Lee works at and they go on a date. A relationship blossoms between Jesse and Lee, though she makes excuses to avoid revealing her housing situation.
00:02:36
Speaker
Lee shares some of Hazel's story with Jesse, eventually confiding that Hazel has asked for Lee's help to leave her husband and will give Lee $50,000 and documents for a new identity in exchange for Lee pretending to be Hazel for an afternoon so that Hazel can board a flight and leave the country. Lee agrees and spends almost two hours at her friend's house. Just before she's about to leave, she visits the study where she finds Jesse's body.
00:03:02
Speaker
Here, the book switches from Lee's point of view to Hazel's as she describes how she met her husband, a successful defense attorney named Benjamin. He offered security and to provide medical care for Hazel's ailing mother in exchange for giving him total control over her life. She remains with him because she otherwise couldn't provide the care her mother needs.
00:03:24
Speaker
Benjamin permits Hazel to work out, and at the gym she meets and instantly connects with a trainer named Jessie. She and Jessie use her gym sessions as cover to sneak off and have sex, and eventually they devise a plan to free Hazel from her marriage by faking her drowning, the drowning that Lee saved Hazel from.
00:03:42
Speaker
We return to Lee's perspective that she's devastated that Jesse, whom she was falling for, is dead. She breaks into his apartment to learn more about him and finds ID for a man named Carter Sumner and starts to think that Jesse might not have been telling her the truth. She pieces together that Hazel and Jesse knew each other and finds a local number in the notebook that Jesse used to track his client's workouts. She dials it and the person on the other end asks if the caller is Lee.
00:04:09
Speaker
Shaken, Lee visits Jesse's brother who is in prison and with each piece of information she learns about Jesse, feels more and more confused. She speaks with Benjamin who reveals that his security team killed Jesse before he offers Lee $25,000 to move to Austin and set up a restaurant there. She considers the offer, but doesn't want to feel the same pressure to succeed that she felt with her first restaurant. She finds a recording hidden within Jesse's pen, which she ultimately provides to the police.
00:04:39
Speaker
We rejoin Hazel, who has been confronted by Benjamin. Hazel is about to end her life when the police arrive and charge her husband with conspiracy to murder Hazel. For a moment, Hazel thinks that this might be a way for her to be free of Benjamin, but it soon becomes clear just how powerful and manipulative he is. The wife of one of Benjamin's partners visits Hazel with suggestions on how to secure her future.
00:05:02
Speaker
She also mentions Benjamin's first wife, whom Hazel doesn't know about. Hazel goes on to learn that this wife died in suspicious circumstances and suspects that Benjamin paid her family off to keep quiet.
00:05:15
Speaker
The situation starts to decline further for Hazel when her mother goes missing and Benjamin's case is dismissed. She's fearful for her life and also for her mother's. She's preparing to sell as much as she can for quick cash when Benjamin finds and threatens her, telling her that Jesse, or Carter, was one of his former clients and didn't care for her the way she thought.
Lee's Decisions and Moral Dilemmas
00:05:36
Speaker
After Hazel learns that Jesse's body has been found, she retrieves her fake passport.
00:05:42
Speaker
The book closes with Hazel, now Nora, finding Lee, now Kelly, running a small beach cafe, and the two agree to run it together. Thanks, Sarah. That was a really great summary of this book that is really quite complicated. There are lots of twists. And if I'm honest, I was relieved that it was your turn to do the summary because this one was tricky.
00:06:07
Speaker
Well, there were a lot of things that happened and kind of the more I thought about it as I was preparing that summary, I was like, this was a really good book because there's so many things that are going on. Exactly. A lot of twists and a lot of relationships between people that you don't realize were taking place. And so that adds a layer to the secrets.
00:06:36
Speaker
So where should we start our, what would you do game? The first, what would you do that I have for you is if you were Lee, would you accept Hazel's offer for the cash? And Hazel, I think off also offers her fake ID saying, um, you know, you'll be able to start a new life if you just do me this favor. Um, well, so.
00:07:03
Speaker
Lee's in a really bad position because, as you mentioned in the summary, the attacker has stolen all her cash and all her identification, so she essentially doesn't exist. I realized that that's the situation, but I don't think that I could do it because she knows that Hazel's husband is
00:07:26
Speaker
extremely violent. I think I would just be too big of a chicken to take this risk that this guy was going to find out what our plan was that I was going to pose as Hazel all day. It means she had to go into their house. She had to go to their house and be seen on their
00:07:44
Speaker
on their security cameras as if she were the wife. I'm just too big of a chicken. I couldn't do it. What about you, Sarah? I think I probably would really think very carefully about taking the money, Brooke, because
00:08:00
Speaker
Throughout the book, Lee talks about how this really isn't her, right? She had been a successful businesswoman. Her restaurant was doing really well and then COVID hit and like so many other businesses and so many other restaurants, it just didn't survive. And because she had borrowed money from a, I don't remember if he was a bookie or some other underground
00:08:29
Speaker
loan shark. She owed this guy a lot of money and he actually injured her, right? Like I think he injured one or two of her fingers. So she got out of town. But this is not the situation she wants to be in. So any opportunity to get out of it, I think if I were her, I would really be considering taking it.
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, it would be a hard decision. I will say that I think that Harding did a really good job kind of illustrating the way that somebody can become homeless really quickly.
00:09:11
Speaker
I found that first part of the book where she is living in her car and gets attacked and everything, I found it really scary because I was like, this could happen to someone. Sometimes you read situations in a genre fiction and you're like, yeah, that's going to happen. But the way she laid it out that she had these bad business dealings and then she had a rift with her family
00:09:33
Speaker
Um, uh, and then, you know, she had no money and this was where the result of it, I felt like it was very realistic. Um, and speaking of the fallout with her family, would you have blackmailed your brother-in-law for money? I mean, okay, she had this scary
Hazel's Escape and Protection Plan
00:09:53
Speaker
guy on her tail who she owed money, but I feel like there might've been some other ways to ask your family for money rather than blackmailing them.
00:10:03
Speaker
I agree. And I think she says she'd only met this, I don't know if her sister was married at the time, but she'd only met this guy once or twice before. He wasn't someone who her sister had been with for years and he was, you know, like part of the family. Maybe because of that,
00:10:25
Speaker
it was easier for her to blackmail him, right? But I would like to think that I would probably approach my sister and say, this guy is bad news.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, because she discovers that he's cheating on the sister. And I think you're right. I don't think they're married yet. And so I agree. The steps would be to go to the sister and say, I have a bad thing to tell you about your fiance. Not, hey, this is a way to make that money that I need for the investor. So that was a choice that really played out badly in Lee's life.
00:11:06
Speaker
And because it cut her off from her family, her parents were no longer wanting to be involved. And yeah, she was cut off.
00:11:15
Speaker
I have another what would you do related to her decision to take on Hazel's identity for that afternoon. The day before, Hazel had arranged for Lee to have a spa day and get completely pampered, have a massage, have a facial, get her hair done. And as it turns out, she got her hair cut almost exactly like
00:11:37
Speaker
Hazel's and Hazel suddenly comes up with that idea. Why don't you pose as me so that I can get out of town? And obviously she had this she had this plan, but Lee doesn't know that. But once Lee is in the house and she's pettered around the kitchen, making sure that she's been visible on the on the in-home security cameras, she decides to go into the husband's study.
00:12:07
Speaker
And there was no reason for her to do that, right? There was nothing that Hazel said, you need to go in and get this thing, or she just was being nosy. Would you have done that?
00:12:23
Speaker
No, that scene is so tense. And like I said, I'd have been too big of a chicken to do it in the first place when you know, I mean, this is like a very affluent couple, right? He's a defense attorney, I think. And they have a big house. They've got security. So she already knows she's got to go into this house. She's going to be on camera. She's got to pose as her. I would be doing the absolute bare minimum of the steps. And I think she had a certain amount of time she needed to spend in there so that she could recreate
00:12:52
Speaker
Hazel's patterns and that's all I would do. I was like Lee, you know, what are you thinking girl? Exactly.
00:13:00
Speaker
And then I remember the first time that I read this book, just that sort of jaw dropping moment when she realizes who is in the chair, because up until this point, we've only had Lee's perspective in the book. And so we don't know, we only know what she knows about Jesse. And here's this guy that she sees this potential future with dead in front of her.
00:13:31
Speaker
I knew that she was going to discover, because we haven't had a dead body yet in this book. We were well into it, maybe over halfway. I knew she was going to find someone dead in there, but my guess was that it was going to be the husband. I was like, oh, Hazel killed her husband.
00:13:49
Speaker
Lee looks like she's Hazel and she's gonna get charged with this but it was one of those moments where I had to put the book down. I was reading an ebook when I read it and when it was Jesse in the chair like I was like oh my gosh it that twist really got me.
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, no, totally. There's multiple conspiracies that are happening, right? There's Hazel and Lee have their plan. Hazel and Jesse have their plan. Benjamin and Jesse have another plan. And I think Jesse might've just even had his own plan as well.
00:14:23
Speaker
I don't remember what they were framing Lee for. Right. So I didn't mention this in the in the intro, but Lee discovers that Jesse was planning to frame Lee with Hazel's help. Right.
Character Analysis and Conclusion
00:14:37
Speaker
One night, Hazel goes to Jesse's apartment when these cars parked outside and steals these knife. She knows that Lee has
00:14:48
Speaker
a large hunting knife that she uses for safety and Hazel goes in and steals that from Lee's car with the intention of putting it in her house so that Jesse can find it when he breaks into the house. Jesse is supposed to be in the house
00:15:04
Speaker
when Lee is there. And I don't remember if he was there to kill Benjamin. That's fuzzy for me. But Hazel ends up protecting Lee by throwing Lee's knife into the ocean and disposing of other evidence that would have supported that story that Lee had become very jealous and obsessed with Hazel and was trying to harm her. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And because they each have this alliance with Jesse,
00:15:31
Speaker
But when they, near the end, they figure out that he's not loyal to either one of them. And so, yeah, Hazel disposes of things to make that plan go away. So basically she sides. She's showing her allegiance to Lee. Here's my, what would you do there? Would you, if you were Hazel, do you think you would have had that second thought and reversed the plan that you had put into action with Jesse?
00:15:57
Speaker
I think so. I like that she did that. She's got this period of time when her husband gets taken away for conspiracy to kill her, and she's alone in the house, and she's really having to think through. For a while, she doesn't know Jesse's dead, right? She's really trying to put all the pieces together of what has happened. Just like the reader, we're trying to do the same thing.
00:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think I would have. I think that that is a way for her to exonerate herself a little bit in the evil plan that she had hatched. If you were in Hazel's position and you'd married this man who turned out to be an absolute monster,
00:16:39
Speaker
I think I can see myself looking for a way to get out, right? And she didn't feel like there was any legal way for her to get out because she thought she had signed a contract with him. Now, whether that kind of a contract would have any standing in court, I have no idea, but her husband was a lawyer and it's suggested that
00:17:05
Speaker
Hazel has convinced herself that she's not very smart. I think she's much smarter than she realizes. But she, you know, has come to believe that she wouldn't be able to figure this out on her own. And so, you know, I think if I were her and she meets Jesse, who is put in front of her by her husband, right? But she meets him and
00:17:33
Speaker
thinks that, yeah, this might be a way out. Yeah, I think that that's pretty believable of what she would be willing to do to get out of that relationship.
00:17:47
Speaker
And Jesse is clearly very attractive and very charismatic to women because he just as easily hooks Lee. That's a what would you do question I had for you, Sarah. Do you think that you would so readily attach yourself to this stranger who just kind of
00:18:06
Speaker
conveniently shows up. And I guess that goes along with you're getting spa treatments and this guy shows up. Like, do you think that you would be suspicious of these strange things all happening at the same time? So I think that's a really good question. And she becomes friends with both Hazel and Jesse at
00:18:27
Speaker
almost the same time, right? And has kind of made a point of sharing that she has kept herself to herself and really not let anybody know who she is or where she is or where she's come from. And yet she meets these two people and very quickly creates strong bonds with both of them. I think Lee is really lonely.
00:18:53
Speaker
So I think that that's a, yeah, like I, I, if I were in her position, I probably would be really appreciative of anybody showing me some kindness. Yeah. I think it came off that way. I think that that is why, uh, as you're reading the story, you can buy into it because, you know, here, and you said it, this is not who she is. It's not how she has typically lived, but.
00:19:21
Speaker
Now she's living in her car, she's only showering if she can like sneak into like a rec center or something, you know, she's not. And so this gives her, I think both Jesse and Hazel give her a sense of like kind of who she used to be, you know, someone who was attractive and somebody who had friends and the instant love affair kind of like,
00:19:47
Speaker
made me worry for her, obviously, and we knew that it wasn't going to be a great decision in the end. But I guess I guess you can understand why she did that. Well, thank you, Brooke. I think this has been really fun to talk about the drowning women, some of the some of the scenarios and whether whether we would be making the same decisions as the characters. It was great. And I think I'll be reading more Robin Harding. I like her way of telling a psychological thriller.
00:20:14
Speaker
And we hope that you enjoyed the episode today too, listeners. Thanks for joining us on Clued In Mystery.
00:20:20
Speaker
I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah, and we both love mystery. Clued In Mystery is written and produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers. If you liked what you heard, please consider telling a friend, leaving a review, or subscribing with your favorite podcast listening app. Visit our website at cluedinmystery.com to sign up for our newsletter, The Clued In Chronicle, or to join our paid membership, The Clued In Cartel. We're on social media at Clued In Mystery.