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essentiallynovel 's review for:
Passenger
by Lisa Lutz
After reading The Last Flight by Julia Clark and feeling like it lacked some suspense, or just something was missing, I chose to pick up another from the same genre. I hadn’t planned on picking up one semi-similar in the whole “woman trying to disappear by taking on different aliases” trope and sadly, this one just didn’t do much for me either.
“Tanya” emerges from the bathroom after taking a shower to find her husband dead at the bottom of their stairs. Rather than call emergency services, she decides to run. She travels around the US, frequently changing her outward appearance and name as her past seems to catch up to her. Along the way she encounters a woman named Blue, who is just as shady but more dangerous than she, and Domenic, a cop whose true motives are unclear. As resources dwindle, as she has close calls with law enforcement and at one point some angry hunters, “Tanya” finds herself in a position to make a very big decision about facing her true past.
This story didn’t turn out at all what I was expecting it to, which is great in general for a thriller, but once again, I found something lacking here. Maybe it’s because I never really connected with the main character. The story is broken up into sections for each alias she goes under and is sprinkled with old emails between a woman named Jo and her friend (?) Ryan, making you wonder what those emails have to do with our main character now in the present. There are certainly twists you don’t expect, but the pacing was all over the place. Sometimes too slow and other times too fast. I couldn’t tell what this story was trying to be about and frankly don’t feel I gained much from reading it.
Content and trigger warnings include several deaths (some by murder and others by accident), theft, violence, profanity, alcohol abuse, a small amount of mentions of sex but they’re quite vague, and infidelity. This thriller didn’t thrill me and I’m giving it maybe 2.5 out of 5.
“Tanya” emerges from the bathroom after taking a shower to find her husband dead at the bottom of their stairs. Rather than call emergency services, she decides to run. She travels around the US, frequently changing her outward appearance and name as her past seems to catch up to her. Along the way she encounters a woman named Blue, who is just as shady but more dangerous than she, and Domenic, a cop whose true motives are unclear. As resources dwindle, as she has close calls with law enforcement and at one point some angry hunters, “Tanya” finds herself in a position to make a very big decision about facing her true past.
This story didn’t turn out at all what I was expecting it to, which is great in general for a thriller, but once again, I found something lacking here. Maybe it’s because I never really connected with the main character. The story is broken up into sections for each alias she goes under and is sprinkled with old emails between a woman named Jo and her friend (?) Ryan, making you wonder what those emails have to do with our main character now in the present. There are certainly twists you don’t expect, but the pacing was all over the place. Sometimes too slow and other times too fast. I couldn’t tell what this story was trying to be about and frankly don’t feel I gained much from reading it.
Content and trigger warnings include several deaths (some by murder and others by accident), theft, violence, profanity, alcohol abuse, a small amount of mentions of sex but they’re quite vague, and infidelity. This thriller didn’t thrill me and I’m giving it maybe 2.5 out of 5.