The Other Passenger by Louise Candlish (2020) Here's the eternal challenge to thriller novelists who lay out a story populated by unsympathetic, unlikable characters......the kind of people you'd go out of your way to avoid in real life......
The challenge - to keep the book hopping with enough "WHAT THE ACTUAL F***!" twists that we the readers will hang in and stay on board with this unappetizing bunch of losers just to see who gets their just desserts or whatever........
In that regard, we'd say Louise Candlish makes a fairly decent job of it in this noir-ish tale of two sets of London based couples undone by a murder plot with triple-whammy surprises that boomerang back on more than a few of them.
Kit and Melia are unmarried but cohabiting millennials living way beyond their means and up their eyeballs in debt.
The strikingly gorgeous and desirable Melia sells real estate for her wealthy middle-aged boss Clare who also has an unmarried live-in partner Jamie. He's another middle-ager who's found himself downsized to working as a barista in a cafe so he's living in Clare's expensive mansion strictly at her pleasure. And yet he resists her efforts to help him climb back up the corporate ladder with career counseling session.
Since Jamie and Kit become travelling pals on commuter boats running up and down the Thames river, they and their partners end up socializing, even though this oddly matched quartet are generations apart in attitude, outlooks and most importantly here.... income.
Jamie and Melia end up in a hot-and-heavy illicit affair.......and then Kit suddenly drops out of sight, which leads to a pair of London detectives showing up to quiz Jamie about the disappearance, since he was the last one to see Kit....alive.
And since Kit and Jamie seemed to have a very loud, nasty argument witnessed by an anonymous "other passenger" on the boat with them, the two cops harbor more than a little interest in Jamie's side of the story.
Hmmmm.......more here than meets the eye, you think? Oh, you betcha.
That's all you'll get from us......since the fun of reading a book like this comes mainly from the amount of "you gotta be kiddin' me!" twists that start to detonate as the story picks up steam to head for the finish line.
Sure enough, author Candlish rolls 'em on out, one after another........with a final chapter that delivers one last perfectly ironic zinger of a finale.
So if you're stuck on a plane, train or commuter boat for a couple hours, this one's an entertaining way to eat up the time......3 stars (***).
No comments:
Post a Comment