"In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family. Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.
Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall onto a luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago, an overnight journey of fourteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.
But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.
With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk."
What worked for me
The premise and tropes seemed right up my alley - I love a good isolated, closed circle mystery. At first, I was a little worried that we were getting too much information in the book's description but there were still plenty of surprises along the way. The whole book takes place on the train and I liked that we jumped right into things without too much set-up.
I liked the cast of characters we were following and enjoyed that we got different POVs throughout the story. The individual characters were hit or miss for me, but I think Sager did a good job of giving everyone a distinct enough personality that they were all easy to tell apart. And the characters I did like - I absolutely loved and found them well developed and their own backstories had more twists than I was expecting.
The mystery investigation was okay, there were certainly enough suspects that it was fun to follow our characters as they tried to piece everything together. I didn't enjoy the solutions/twists as much as the initial investigation, but up until about the 75% mark, I was having a great time.
What didn't work for me
The twists and reveals worked the first time around, but I found that Sager used the same or similar enough twists multiple times in the book so the later ones were really dulled. It ended up feeling very lazy from a plotting perspective and that he just couldn't bother coming up with any other ideas. While I suppose I didn't expect the same twist twice, and therefore you could say I was extra surprised, it ended up feeling like I was duped and was more of a let down.
Similarly, the ending felt incredibly rushed and like it was the rough draft idea just a bit beyond [put ending here]. While technically we did find out the answers to the questions posed during the trip, it felt very unfulfilling and abrupt and there were some parts that just didn't make any sense from what we know about certain characters.
The tone of the story wasn't quite consistent with the time the story takes place in. I didn't realize going into it that the book takes place in the early 1940s and to be honest, I forgot a lot of the time while reading until there was a comment or reference to something. The tone and writing was so modern as well as I think Sager didn't quite spend enough time with the setting of the story. It was a strange sort of disconnect that didn't bother me until one of those references jolted me and reminded me that this is actually the 1940s and thus the picture I was working with in my head was wrong.
While some of the characters were fantastic, I found the majority to be pretty flat and annoying. A few of them felt like they were just there to pad out the numbers to give the investigation more dead ends to run down and make it harder for the reader to keep track of everyone. I wish Sager had spent the time to develop each of the characters just a little bit more so we could understand their motives and circumstances a little more which would make them feel just a bit more human.
Overall, this was an okay read, but I really wanted to like it more than I did. This had a lot of my favorite tropes but it just didn't quite come together for me at the end.
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