Review: The Other Passenger by Louise Candlish

There is an eerie sense of claustrophobia almost from page one in The Other Passenger, the latest twisty thriller from British author Louise Candlish. It is the day after the Christmas break and Jamie has just boarded the river bus, the boat that takes him on his daily commute to work. Middle aged Jamie is keen to see Kit, his cool, charismatic and younger travel companion, but today, Jamie is nowhere to be seen on the boat. His other travel companion refuses to talk to him. Then two police officers board the boat. Kit has been reported missing. The last person to see him was Jamie. And another passenger has claimed to have seen the two men arguing. But Jamie didn't harm Kit ... did he?

The novel zigzags between the past year and the present, telling the story of the friendship between Jamie and Kit, and their partners Claire and Melia. There are plenty of deceptions, undercurrents and quiet frankly, none of are terribly nice people. However, the biggest divide between them all is the generation gap. There is resentment on both sides, Jamie and Claire resenting the younger pair for their youth, while Kit and Melia resent Jamie and Claire for have a home and lifestyle that is utterly unobtainable for people of their generation. 

But does any of that make Jamie a killer?

Although this book had an interesting premise, I found that the storytelling was let down by a main character that I felt absolutely no compassion for and a situation that soon lost its creepy "it could happen to anyone" vibe and soon began to border on the ridiculous. Overall, this was a disappointing read for me, though there were a couple of interesting twists. 

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my ARC of The Other Passenger. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more