A Fatal Crossing: Agatha Christie meets Titanic in this unputdownable mystery

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So, you see, THAT plottwist alone is a good enough reason to read this book already. It's really good, you'll enjoy it. And again: take a look at that cover. Isn't it gorgeous? My favourite westward Atlantic crossing detective novel is Peter Lovesey's The Fake Inspector Dew (1981), but A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle is a first-rate addition to the corpus [...] A very good debut novel' The Critic Read more Look Inside Details November 1924. The Endeavour sets sail to New York with 2,000 passengers - and a killer - on board. Whatever happened, it’s a mystery that is supposed to keep readers guessing and hopefully continue reading which I did! I ate this up and I can’t even say why!! This may be a closed-circle mystery, but it wasn’t suspenseful even though they were all trapped on one ship. Birch and Temple spend their days interviewing other passengers, potential suspects and witnesses, going from one cabin to the next while the only thing Temple does is be angry and shout at people and Birch always calms everyone down. A book set in my era. In my location. On my transport. An Agatha Christie like plot. A myriad of interesting characters and plot twists.

What took the cake though was the ending. My initial review said that I gasped out loud – I did!!!!! – but upon reflection, I think it’s an utterly underserved plot twist meant to do nothing but that: induce gasps. I don’t want to compare it with GOTs “Red Wedding” because different things happen, but it was about as unexpected. I usually LOVE unexpected plot twists, I live for them in my murder mysteries, but this one was so out of the blue, so far-fetched, ungracious and ungrateful to everything that came prior that it felt wrong and unearned. It’s super hard to talk about it without spoiling anything but it’s basically meant to turn the whole novel on its head and make you see it in a different light. I just thought it was lazy writing to make an otherwise super dull plot and average novel more exciting. I mean, I’m 100% pro-choice, I just wish the author had chosen a different ending for this book. It’s November 1924, when the ship Endeavour sets sail from Southampton for New York, with a total of 2000 passengers and crew. Totally. It was a tough process, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t ultimately enjoy it. And, of course, there’s no beating the feeling you get from knowing that the passion project you worked on at your kitchen table is about to be on shelves. After all this time, to think that folks are finally going to read it makes all those tough days seem worthwhile. With twist after gut-punching twist, A Fatal Crossing really is an ingenious thriller. Highly recommend' M. W. Craven The story brought two key characters in Birch, the ship's officer and Temple, the policeman who happened to be on the boat; don't ever believe in coincidences. Birch really had my heartstrings with his rather tragic past and depressed nature. I liked him a lot and felt him to be the intergrity compass of the piece. Temple seemed shady from the start with a slice of maybe he's okay.I had high hopes for this book. I’m a big Agatha Christie fan and I love settings where the suspects are maintained together such as on a ship like this one. But at least, that made him have something in common with the other characters because they were just as flat. When I say flat, I mean Ewan-McGregor-in-Trainspotting-flat ( physically speaking!!). Birch is supposed to be more interesting because the reader learns early on that SOMETHING tragic happened in this past that he is still not over yet. All we know is that it’s a familial tragedy that makes him alienated from the rest of the crew, boohoo. An autopsy determined they had died from exposure to the cold, an outcome that appeared predetermined as soon as they lost their way.

The very first thing I noticed about this book was the author’s writing style. Calling it juvenile might go a bit too far but it was definitely too tame for my taste. Bland and boring, it was immediately forgettable and repetitive. It’s always “the ship stretches the best part of…” or “the best part of fifty thousand tons” or “the restaurant’s capacity to seat the best part of five hundred diners” or “the best part of an hour/minute”… Whilst there’s a great twist at the end that I hadn’t seen coming, the main murder mystery just didn’t hold my attention. The book felt over long in places, and the storyline about the missing daughter felt too much like a plot device to really inspire any sympathy for Birch. Set almost 100 years ago ( 1924), A Fatal Crossing deftly combines a sense of its period setting with the plot structure and dramatic devices that readers expect a century later.While most of A Fatal Crossing conforms with a traditional "whodunnit" mystery format in the traditional style, the dramatic ending comprises a shift into thriller territory, with a great twist that I certainly didn't see coming!