A review by diane
El último pasajero by Manel Loureiro

2.0

I got The Last Passenger from the Kindle First program. And like everyone else I was sucked in "Nazi cruise-ship time travel." Actually, a bigger draw for me was: '"What could possibly inspire a novel like this? “I stumbled by chance onto the real history of the cursed Nazi cruise ships in my research for the third Apocalypse Z book,” Manel told me. “In the thirties, the KDF, the Nazi leisure organization, set up luxury pleasure cruises for workers in the Third Reich. All but one ship—the Valkyrie—set sail and met with tragic demises. I had to explore that curse.” '

Would that ANY of that had been mentioned in the book.

Seriously, that line makes me want to go out and write the book I thought this was going to be.

This starts off with a suitably creepy beginning of the ship being found, derelict, in 1939...and then it goes to the present day. With everyone going along with an insane plan. That turns insaner. Add ghosts, possession, time travel, and explicit sex.

What it wasn't was much fun, and for me the reason for that two-fold: the characters aren't very well-drawn, so when they're possessed to start reliving a curse over and over, they're just puppets. (I hate stories with predestination or fate in them -- I can't stand "soul mate" stories, for instance.)

And the identity of "the last passenger" didn't have much impact on me, because gods am I tired of "woman as holy vessel" too.

So...enh.