Saturday, October 2, 2021

HOSTAGE, by Clare Mackintosh

    


Mystery/Thriller -- 3 stars

Mina is a flight attendant on the inaugural 20 hour direct flight from London to Sydney.  She should be taking care of her business class passengers, but shortly after lift off, she receives an ominous note: "The following instructions will save your daughter's life..."  The choice is hers and hers alone...save her daughter or save 350 passengers. ----- I hate flying, so this should have been a knuckle-biter novel for me.  Instead, it just felt contrived with the necessary situational tension suggested but never really created.  Mina finds her daughter's EpiPen in the galley.  Not only did no one see a passenger slip into this employee-only area, but neither did any of the other flight attendants notice the device sitting in the middle of the counter.  Really?  Much time is spent with Mina examining the passengers and deciding (incorrectly, of course) who is to blame. When the novel's focus switches to Mina's husband and daughter at home, more detail is revealed of their family dynamics which, I guess, was supposed to add more tension to the pair's own hostage situation. It just seemed to me that, once the "badness" was set up, Ms. Mackintosh wasn't sure what to do with it. It's by no means a bad book, but it could have been so much more.

No comments:

Post a Comment