The Girl on the Train

This book by Paula Hawkins has received so much press that I am not sure what I can add to it. A contemporary English setting for a story similar to Gone Girl, it involves several women narrators whose lives all center--at various times-- on a small bedroom community outside London and whose lives have all intersected with one man that you would never suspect, making him the obvious culprit. He is a successful sociopath, enjoying life to the fullest...working at a job, but making time for affairs with other women even as he maintains the facade of being happily married and raising a family.
The dramatic tension really centers on Rachel, now divorced for two years from Tom Watson, a man she was wildly in love with but could not have children with. The inability to conceive drove her into depression and further into drinking...to the point where she started having blackouts. Tom in the meanwhile is having an affair with Anna, an estate agent. Once he is divorced from Rachel, Tom and Anna marry and soon thereafter, Evie is born.
Rachel has rented a room from an old friend in a slightly more distant commuter community and the train she takes into London every day goes right past the back garden of her old home, where Tom and Anna still live. She takes the train every day even though she long ago got fired from her public relations job for coming to work drunk and being abusive of clients. Her landlord/ friend does not know this because Rachel hasn't told anyone. The train always slows at a crossing near her old home and so she spies on Tom and Anna and on a couple a few doors down, who she imagines to have the perfect life...she makes up names for them (Jess and Jason) and projects her fantasies for a perfect marriage onto them. Then one day, she sees the woman at this house kissing another man and she is devastated to have the fantasy destroyed. Shortly thereafter she learns that Jess, who is really named Megan, has disappeared. She eventually tells the police about having seen Megan with another man, but her credibility is tainted by her drinking and her erratic behavior, which has included stalking her ex-husband and his family. When the police don't seem to take her seriously, she decides to directly contact the husband of the missing woman.
We follow this story through the narratives of Rachel, Megan and Anna, moving back and forth in time over about a year. I had to occasionally refer back to the chapter heading to keep the dates sorted. As Megan's disappearance and then her apparent abduction and murder are revealed, Rachel begins to remember bits and pieces of the night she went back to her old street ...the night that Megan disappeared.  It was all I could do not to skip to the end and find out who did it. But you will have guessed it by now, right? Tightly and believably plotted. Rachel is the perfect anti-hero for whom you both despair and cheer.