A lacklustre sequel to what was already an average thriller, Second Life certainly doesn’t fail to disappoint.

Although I wasn’t the biggest fan of Before I Go to Sleep, a page turner that, in my opinion, was let down by a distinctly predictable ending, I felt that after the relative success of the film adaption, S. J. Watson’s latest release had great potential for improvement. I was evidently mistaken.

The thriller centres on the repercussions following the murder of Kate, the sister of Julia, the protagonist, whose son Connor had been adopted by Julia ten years prior to the opening of the novel. Julia’s guilt, both over her failure to protect her sister and her adoption of Connor, which was motivated by Kate, is the driving force of the action in the book and eventually leads to her beginning a tame imitation of a sadistic affair with a stranger she meets online.

This ill-founded and stereotypical guilt appeared as a poor justification for Julia’s actions in the novel. Her relative lack of grief over her sister’s death meant that she simply appeared to be self-serving and motivated by self-interest, and Watson’s attempts to present her as moved by a duty to ‘avenge’ her sister’s death and to find answers on behalf of her son were entirely unconvincing.

Instead, the affair and its ensuing complications are lacking in bite and are presented as an alternative form of monotony to Julia’s clearly failing marriage rather than a product of desire.

She comes across as irritatingly naïve to the potential dangers of online dating and the whole resulting situation is a predictable and unrealistic coincidence.

The inside cover of the book ends with the tagline “She’s living two lives. She might lose both.” Just as the disappointing lack of drama in the affair projects an image of traditional suburban nonconformity, this also seems a particularly conservative perception that the end of a marriage is a life-ending prospect. Although the shadow cast by Kate’s murder does lend a degree of danger to the novel, the story would have been far more satisfactory if it had surrendered to the classic thriller genre as opposed to focusing on a fairly dull form of family drama. Yet, Julia’s main preoccupation throughout the book is her attempt to balance ‘two lives’ while professing the importance of sustaining a marriage of convenience she appears completely uncommitted to.

Every character in this novel seems to have been selected from a box of stock-character stereotypes, from the overworked doctor husband and the dissatisfied housewife through to the charming-but-dangerous online fling. While I hadn’t entirely predicted the eventual ending, the story took so many predictable turns to reach that point it was hardly a surprise.

The only favourable conclusion I can reach on Second Life is that it may have been bearable if it were 100 pages shorter – as it stands, it is not worth your time.