Book Review: "The Other Passenger" by Louise Candlish

"The Other Passenger" is something I got on my kindle feeling it was going to be one of my 'wind-down' weekend reads. In fact, I was wrong. By the end of the book my heart and mind were both racing and I was practically shaking with a strange smile across my face. I was sitting on the floor for over two hours and honestly, I didn't care. This book was just incredible and, everything added up in the end - absolutely everything. It was like someone planned this book purely to mess with me. The whole book is an act of misdirection. It's like you think that you figure out the 'secret' in the middle of the book but there is a whole next rabbit hole you're about to climb down and you don't even recognise it. You weren't really looking.

The book is narrated by a man called Jamie. His girlfriend is called Clare and he's almost fifty years' old. They meet a young millennial couple called Christopher 'Kit' Roper and Melia 'Me' Roper. They are married but Jamie and Clare aren't. One day, after being friends for about a year, Kit goes missing and nobody can find him. After a bit of an argument, after some incidents that have occurred between them, Jamie is the only suspect the police are looking into. But there is something wholly not right about the situation - something a whole lot more that may, or may not include Jamie. There is something uncomfortable about the entire situation, and you have to be paying really close attention to be able to see what's actually going on here. It's right there and yet, you will never ever guess it.

The book is structured in a really cool way. We go from the discussions with the police back to particular situations that he is talking about and cover every month in 2019 in order alternating between December 2019 and the rest of the months. Then, we finally move into January 2020 in the last part of the book and you realise that without the flashbacks, the book takes place over the course of about a month or so. It is a brilliantly planned book because there is just so much information that you are fed that is relevant to the storyline and you don't even realise it until the New Years' Eve of 2019, you don't realise it until early January 2020 and even then - when you do realise it, you don't know how to feel.

I think the best thing to do is to put your faith in Clare because she is the voice of reason. Also the more you pay attention to what the characters say the more you will realise what the hell is going on. There is something strangely insane about the way in which these people interact. The idea that Jamie would be blamed for the disappearance of Kit seems almost inconceivable at the start of the book but towards the middle, you can see why he was viewed this way. When the last bits of the book come out and everything unfolds, you really don't know what has actually happened. You want to think that you are smarter than that, but when you look back over the book you can see all the things you missed. And trust me, you missed almost everything.

The book is a mixture between classic crime and twisted modern thriller. It is a terrifying manipulation of tactics and when it is all over, you have to think not about the characters and their feelings, but you have to think about the justification of it all. Is it justified? Is it not? There's honestly something uncomfortable about it all and you, the reader, has to make that decision about guilt and innocence. That is, in fact, the most uncomfortable thing about it.