The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian (2018) Chances are, it'll be long, long time before we ever catch up the new HBO series adapted from this novel....(starring the 'Big Bang Theory's Kaley Cuoco).....
.......cause we don't get HBO and aren't likely to ever get it any time in the near future.
And since everyone always says, 'the book is always better'......we read the book.
We usually strongly agree with 'the book's always better' maxim, but having finished this one.......well, let's just say Kaley and the makers of the TV show aren't facing a high bar to leap over, especially if they want to take liberties with the story.
Though he's fairly prolific, we've only read one other Chris Bohjalian book, "The Double Bind". He's kind of a tightrope walker, balancing his stories between literary fiction (complete with endless internal monolgues) and the tropes of twisty suspense thrillers.
Again, he tries to have it both ways here, in this tale of Cassie Bowden, an alcoholic, sex-addicted flight attendant who wakes up in a Dubai hotel room to find her hot hook-up of the night has had his throat cut from ear to ear.
On the literary fiction side, the book wants to provide an incisive overview of Cassie's many misadventures, poor choices and her constant surrender to her addictions.
On the thriller end, Bohjalian dabbles in the twists and turns of a bunch of nasty Russian spies who are responsible for the poor fellow's slit throat and have targeted Cassie as next up on their hit parade. Double agents and triple agents lurk all over the place for you spy lovers.
We doubt, however, that readers who dig the spy stuff will muster the patience to plow through all the pages about Cassie's boozing and terrible childhood.
But even the spy fans might scoff and snort with disbelief at the far-fetched twists the book unloads in its final chapters.
And the readers of both serious fiction and thrillers will roll their eyes at the book's ludicrous epilogue, which sounds like Bohjalian watched too many 1980's Spielberg movies and thought this kind of wrap-up would best snag him a movie deal.
He got his deal allright........but as tempting as it may read on paper, we'd advise the HBO people to ditch that silly epilogue and come up with something that doesn't insult anyone's intelligence.
1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2) If the book really does end up better than the TV series, that show's already in a lot of trouble.
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