The Last Flight

The Last Flight
By: Julie Clark

Apparently I’m on a #metoo kick right now (unintentionally) having just read The Night Swim right before this. I would say this book is a lot more subtle in that respect though and touches on physical abuse instead of rape.

I was really intrigued by the premise of two women wanting to escape their lives and deciding to switch tickets, then finding out one of the planes crash leaving one woman to figure out the secrets of the other potentially dead woman. Very mysterious. The flipping POVs in this book was very clear to follow- Claire was always in the present and Eva was all in the past. I felt like the pace was good and kept me engaged.

The author made a good point in the back of the book that a lot of female-driven suspense novels popular these days portray an unreliable narrator or kind of a crazy woman type of thing and so she wanted to write something with strong, smart, kind, rational, normal-I guess, female characters. I noticed that and appreciate it. She proved that you can still write a decent book without dysfunctional main characters!

I also appreciated the theme of female friendship. It’s refreshing when a female character who is struggling through something has a reliable and genuine female friend- not a romantic interest (male or female)- to help her on her journey. True friendships are really downplayed in suspense novels, obviously sometimes for good reason, but I think in this book it added a lot to the likability of the story and characters to not fall back on romantic feelings to get them through the day.

One thing I was a bit disappointed by was what I felt was a missed opportunity to add more action towards the end as Claire’s ‘disappearance’ starts to unravel. I thought the author was gonna go there but then within a paragraph the danger immediately dissipated and it wrapped up fairly quickly. Overall I liked how it ended, but wish she would have added an extra few scenes of dangerous peril with Claire’s story before it came to a close.

[Profanity: 27 f-words, 14 s-words]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**

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