Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets Dexter. Jude and Kate are the perfect neighbors with the perfect cover…He’s a contract killer. She likes to even the score. Smack dab in the middle of suburbia, few married couples are as competitive as Jude and Kate. But then, most married couples don’t keep score in the form of body counts. Each hell-bent on a silent pact to out-do the other, the games begin. Who … other, the games begin.
Who ends up on top is anyone’s guess. But with these two, one thing’s for sure– not everyone comes out alive.
After all, there are a few things they can agree on: All is fair in love and war. And if they can’t make it work–they’re dead in the water.
In the tradition of Gone Girl and Behind Closed Doors comes a gripping, twisting, furiously clever read that demands your attention, and keeps you guessing until the very end. For fans of the anti-heroine and stories told in unorthodox ways, Dead In The Water delivers us the perfect dark and provocative villains.
Dead In The Water is the second book in the Water series. Available in digital and print.
Series Praise
“If Tarantino were a woman and wrote novels…they might read a bit like this.”
“Fans of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins meet your next obsession.”
“Provocative and scary.”
“A dark and edgy page-turner. What every good thriller is made of.”
“I devoured this novel in a single sitting, absolutely enthralled by the storyline. The suspense was clever and unrelenting!”
“Completely original and complex.”
“Compulsive and fun.”
“No-holds-barred villains. Fine storytelling full of mystery and suspense.”
“Fresh and breathtaking insight into the darkest corners of the human psyche.”
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WOW. I loved this book just as much as the first! I was nervous I wouldn’t; that happens with a series sometimes. But I was pleasantly surprised that Dead in the Water was just as creepy, tantalizing and wonderfully psychotic as Water Under the Bridge. So. Dang. Good. KEEP IT UP, GIRL. On to the third!
Dead In The Water is the second book in The Water Trilogy by Britney King. She describes it as a psychological thriller, and it is, but not for reasons I am familiar with. This is not a story of twisted, deep mental scarring with resultant bad behavior. Jude Riley is an assassin, one of two main characters who the reader appropriately meets in a therapist’s office. Jude wants to join “the firm,” and this interview is part of the hiring process. Questions about Jude’s wife Kate make Jude feel uncomfortable. He can’t tell the truth, that Kate is an assistant assassin. While trying to work out believable answers for the skilled psych-evaluator, Jude also reminisces about secrets he keeps from Kate. Lying can be more difficult than telling the truth. But telling the truth could result in bad consequences for Jude and Kate, a couple who live well outside the law.
While Jude is perfectly happy to live inside a life of secrecy, not socializing with neighbors and limiting all community involvement, Kate has different ambitions. She wants dinner parties, barbeques, and neighborhood discussion groups during the time she is not on a mission with her husband. The pair are supposedly a pair of freelance assassins specializing in targets who have managed to go unpunished by traditional law enforcement. There is a minor disconnect here because even if the couple operates independently, they must get orders from somewhere. This element is not explored in the story, and it makes almost no difference to the quality of the story. This question of employer identity hung around in my mind as I continued the story. I expected a solution to appear at some time. If it appeared; I missed it. In Jude’s therapy session mentioned above, Jude is trying to obtain a position with a company that performs the same job; the evaluation by the therapist is to see how well Jude can keep confidences.
Jude is the dominant person in the relationship as far as accepting and planning assassinations. Kate seems willing to learn from him and seemingly accepts all Jude’s plans but occasionally adds a few elements Jude did not and would not appreciate. In their first assassination of this story, Kate is late and loses the element of surprise the couple was counting on. After the subject was subdued, Kate wanted to administer a few bruising marks. Her actions would leave evidence that the death was not a suicide, and Jude was not happy. From this point forward, Jude will have frequent flashes of thought that it might be easier to terminate Kate. Jude feels she is changing in many ways not for the better. In a man and wife assassination team, when one member thinks it might be better to terminate the other, tensions rise. Jude will resist this urge and almost treats Kate’s mistakes as if they are the mistakes of a silly child. An example I found humorous:
“It’s impossible to be married for any length of time and not have plotted your spouse’s death at least once. Love is dynamic that way.” (p.195)
The story is told in chapters alternating between a Jude perspective and a Kate point of view. Occasionally there are time shifts as each character remembers things in their pasts that got them to the present place. The shifts of time and narrator voice are well done and easy to follow. It quickly becomes obvious that Jude and Kate are a mystery to each other. There is lots of surface communication, but little depth. When an impasse occurs, the couple has sex. Anywhere, anytime. The language used to portray sex is inoffensive as far as I am concerned. No need for a trigger warning. I thought the frequent allusions to sex were humorous. More dark humor appears with the very casual acceptance of death. When friend Anne suggests that she might dance with Jude, Kate is only briefly jealous, comforting herself with thoughts of the ease with which she might kill Anne. Subjects are killed and bodies are hidden in cars of the non-killing spouse, without their knowledge of course. The contents of car trunks lead to tense situations in which a body might inconveniently appear. Again, I thought this more humorous than suspenseful. Here is an example of what I find funny. Jude and Kate are having a dinner party, but there is a complication.
“We can’t leave her (Monique, the ex-nanny) here, Jude,” I say, nudging you in the right direction. “The party starts in twenty minutes.” (p.58).
Jude and Kate have a daughter, Olivia, and a son, Brady. They also have secrets. Brady seems to be closely following in Jude’s footsteps. It is a spoiler I won’t reveal and is another element that makes the novel worth reading. This story is not my first Britney King novel, nor will it be my last. This author writes fast-paced, page-turner, read-in-one session novels. I gave this novel four plus Amazon stars, not five, because of several unanswered questions I still had at the end. Mysterious is entertaining, but I was looking for a few more clues about what was going on in character lives than the story provided
This story was Amazing! I loved reading book 2. Wow! Bravo! I was completely in awe of how this story went about. I literally did not want to put this book down. I met the characters in Water Under the Bridge and felt a little uncertain about the characters, but Dead in the Water brought them full circle for me and I have fallen in love with them.
Dead in The Water is the continuation of Kate and Jude’s story that started in Water Under the Bridge. The first book was about how they met and in Dead in The Water we see how they live as a married couple and try to fit in as best as they can. I had no idea what to expect because killers are pretty unpredictable, at least Kate really was. Just like in the first book, Kate did things her own way and didn’t really like to follow rules. She liked to push Jude’s buttons. Jude is the exact opposite, very straight to the point and follows his own set of rules. Their relationship was pretty dysfunctional in my opinion. A couple of times Jude had to bail Kate out and that did create a rift between the two.
There was a lot of great character development for them as a couple. There were times tensions were running very high. I loved how everything in this story developed and how the characters handled certain situations, was it always the right way? That is debatable but Britney really stayed true to the characters. I learned a lot of new things about the characters in this book and I enjoyed the short flashbacks into the characters pasts. Those flashbacks gave a great idea why the characters are the way they are.
I loved everything about this book. It was dark and twisted and I just couldn’t get enough. The writing style (second person POV/internal monologue) took me less time to get used to in this book and it worked perfectly. It added something extra to the story and set the vibe for the whole book. Even though this book can be read as a stand-alone, I still highly recommend you to start with Water Under the Bridge to fully understand and experience these characters. Read this book if you love stories about unconventional characters/couples, where you have no idea what is going to happen. Britney King has created such an unique story with one of the most intriguing characters. I was hooked on their relationship and individual decision making. This book was amazing!
Even better than the first book!