Great pacing, super fun thriller, great as audiobook too. The last third has some reeeeeeaaalllyy explainey dialogue.

This will be a great movie whenever it’s optioned. ( )

An easy 4 stars. This kept my interest and felt unique rather than just one more iteration of a plot I've read repeatedly. It was sort of thought provoking even, I don't think I'll forget it right away. ( )

Before the global pandemic, thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people took cruises all over the world, and I was amongst them. And every year, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of those passengers went missing. In some cases the disappearances were never solved. Some cases have made headlines in Australian and international newspapers. But my guess is that very few of the missing were meant to be somewhere else.

When Sarah goes off to Barcelona for a conference Adam Dunne accepts that she will be away for just 4 days. When she doesn't answer his phone messages he puts it down to technology failure. It is only when he finds out that he is the only one who thinks she has gone to a conference that he becomes alarmed. Work says she has called in sick, and her parents are unaware that she is away. When she is not on her scheduled return flight then Adam becomes really alarmed.

What has happened to Sarah, and the reasons behind it, takes a bit of untangling. Adam finds himself on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean with another man whose wife went missing from the same ship a year earlier. There is yet another story running in the background of this book and it is not until nearly the end of the book that the reason for it being there is revealed.

I ended the book feeling that while I thought I knew everything, there were some t's not crossed and some i's not dotted. Maybe I just wasn't reading carefully enough at that stage. Nevertheless it was an engaging read. It is a debut novel, and the praise heaped on the novels that follow it encourage me to read this author again. ( )

adam's girlfriend leaves on a trip to barcelona for work which was actually a cruise triste with her boyfriend and so starts this very twisty, very excellent story. ( )

This is the first time I've read Catherine Howard and while I enjoyed the book there were some confusing things. The red herring it was interesting, but pointless. What happened to Estelle confusing. Then I kind of felt bad that I cared more about Adam finishing his screen play, than what happened to Sarah. It's a good book but not great. ( )