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Louise Candlish – The Other Passenger | Review

Title: The Other Passenger

Author: Louise Candlish

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 411

Rating: 4/5

I was sent a signed copy of this book for free as part of a bookish subscription box that reached out to me, but I don’t think that will influence my review. Still, I guess that’s a disclaimer for you.

The theme of the box that I received was all about the commute and this was pretty much the perfect book for it because it was mostly set on the commuter boats that people take to get into the city. As for the genre, it’s basically as close to generic contemporary thriller as you can get, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We have a lot of the classics tropes here, from an unreliable narrator to tons of twists and turns, complex interpersonal relationships and of course that little technique of jumping backwards and forwards through time to advance what’s happening in the present by bringing up something that happened in the past and which changes the way we look at things.

Other than that, I don’t really want to say too much about the plot, purely because as with most of these, half of the point is being taken by surprise. And I will say that while there were one or two things that I called pretty early on, there were also a couple of twists here and there that I didn’t spot.

It probably also helped that I received quite a nice edition of this, a hardback with the author’s signature in it, and so it was quite an aesthetically pleasing read, too. I can’t say that I’m the biggest fan of thrillers in general, as I tend to prefer either cosy mysteries, private detectives or gritty police procedural novels, but it certainly did the job and was a pleasant enough read, keeping me going until the end to find out the truth about what happened.

And that brings us on to the question of whether I’d recommend it or not, and that really depends upon the type of reader that you are. If you’re really into modern thrillers and you loved Gone Girl and Girl on the Train, you’re probably going to like this one. There are a ton of twists, more than I’ve seen in a novel of this size in quite a long time, and the characters are just warped enough to keep them interesting.

Learn more about The Other Passenger.

Hugh Laurie – The Gun Seller | Review

Title: The Gun Seller

Author: Hugh Laurie

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 342

Rating: 4*/5

Hugh Laurie – The Gun Seller

Hugh Laurie is a man of many talents. He was fantastic as one half of Fry and Laurie, and I learned how to play a bunch of his comedy songs on guitar. He was great as Dr. House, although I was a little late to the game on that one. And it turns out that he’s also a decent author, as this book attests to.

It’s basically a cross between a comedy novel and a tale of espionage, reminiscent of Graham Greene at times. Laurie is a pretty good writer, although some parts of it were duller than others, and it’s mainly the dialogue and the interplay between characters that makes it stand out. He’s also paid a lot of attention to the plot, and it often feels as though every detail has been accounted for.

The main problem that I had with it was that I thought it should have ended about two thirds of the way into it. The ending was needed for the rest of the book to work, but it wasn’t particularly well executed and I thought it could have done with a little more work. I found my attention drifting as I neared the end, and I spent the last thirty pages thinking vaguely about what I was planning on reading next.

Overall, though, it was still an impressive little novel, and it’s a shame that it’s the only one that Laurie has released – to my knowledge, at least. It’s the kind of book that you could take on holiday and read on the beach or simply dip in and out of on the commute, especially because the story line remains fairly consistent throughout so it doesn’t matter too much if you forget what was happening and then come back to it. And if you took the covers off and tested it against contemporary thrillers from famous authors, I’m pretty sure it could hold its own.