What better way to get to New York from the UK but on a luxury cruise liner? When Caz Ripley, the owner of a small café, boards the RMS Atlantica with her partner Pete and nearly a thousand other people, it seems the ideal way to spend a week, especially as Pete can afford one of the most expensive cabins on the ship.

On the second day, Caz wakes up to find that Pete has disappeared. Along with everyone else on board, including all of the crew. The ship is still moving, however, the controls locked in position…

So I’ve been having trouble reading recently – partly due to busy evenings playing Christmas carols in various locales with my band, partly because I’m having trouble getting the website who’s currently stealing my reviews to stop…

[WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOGPOST TO POINT OUT THAT IF YOU ARE READING THIS ON A TECH SHOP WEBSITE, THEY STOLE THIS POST SO WOULD YOU TRUST THEM ENOUGH WITH YOUR MONEY? DIDN’T THINK SO…]

Well, that was mildly cathartic. Let’s see if that gets past the thieving bot… Where was I?

Oh, yes, so I decided that I’d try and jump-start my reading with one of the books that seems to be all over my ex-Twitter feed with praise and recommendations, namely this standalone thriller. Everyone seems to love it, and… yes, you know where this is going.

Regular readers know that my first and foremost interest in a mystery or thriller is the plot, trying to guess what’s going on. And the problem with high-concept thrillers like this one is that there usually aren’t many (or any, the cynical person might say) viable solutions to the situation the lead character finds themselves in. In this case, assuming there aren’t aliens or wizards involved, there are, as far as I can see, precisely two and thankfully, this isn’t using “it’s a dream”, because that never works…

So, going in, especially when three more passengers decide that to make the title a bit misleading and show up on the boat (that’s not a spoiler, it happens really early), I guessed where this was going. I found it dragging a bit until this aspect was confirmed but it doesn’t take too long before this aspect was confirmed.

It’s not until the final quarter or so before things took for me an interesting turn but I still had the “where is this going?” thought in my head and it mostly went as expected. Oh, I didn’t expect the final page – that’s worth mentioning – but it’s just silly, rather than shocking…

OK, that’s more moaning, so why did I read it to the end? Well, the book did have me hooked. It’s well written and I liked the central character a lot. The pacing is good and the physical situations are tense. It’s a perfectly good thriller and I should say that I’ve often banged on about things being obvious only for people to tell me that they really weren’t – maybe I was overthinking things. But to be a great thriller, I need to be surprised, and in this case, I just wasn’t.

Anyone else read this one and want to provide a counterpoint?