A high-speed train. A deadly game. Three hours to save your family.
A father and daughter are caught in a deadly game of ‘I Spy’ on a train journey from Paris to London in this brand-new claustrophobic thriller from C. M. Ewan, author of The House Hunt and One Wrong Turn.
Whilst queuing for the Eurostar in Paris, Mark’s four-year-old-daughter points out a fellow traveller – a ‘Bad Man’ – during a game of ‘I Spy’. As they board the train, he realizes her description may not have been wrong, as the man now carries a different suitcase – and is sitting very near to them.
This new high-octane thriller weaves an emotional family survival plot and will leave readers shuddering.
C. M. Ewan is a pseudonym for Chris Ewan, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of many mystery and thriller novels. Chris’s first standalone thriller, Safe House, was a bestseller in the UK and was shortlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.
He is also the author of the thrillers One Wrong Turn, The House Hunt, The Interview, Dead Line, Dark Tides, Long Time Lost and A Window Breaks, as well as the Good Thief’s Guide series of mystery novels. The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam won the Long Barn Books First Novel Award and has been published in thirteen countries.
Chris lives with his wife and their two children in Somerset, where he writes full time.
Find Chris on twitter/X: @ChrisEwan and Instagram: @c.m.ewan
My thoughts: Travelling with children is stressful enough without one of them being kidnapped on the Eurostar between Paris and London, but that’s what happens to Mark as he returns from a solo parenting holiday with his young daughter and stepdaughter, teenager Freya.
He looks away for a few minutes and Freya’s gone. With his toddler in his arms, he can’t search as thoroughly as he’d like, but then a stranger tells him to sit down. If he does as he’s told then Freya will be fine. But if he doesn’t, she dies.
His wife Claire isn’t stuck at work dealing with IT chaos, she’s meeting someone, someone they all believed had died six years before. And the people who have Freya would like to talk to that someone. Mark has to make that happen. But with no way to talk to Claire due to the huge underwater tunnel he’s in, he’s stuck begging for the life of his teenage daughter and keeping his other daughter occupied. It might not be a long trip but for Mark it’s the longest train ride of his life.
It’s a really compelling and fascinating concept, they’re stuck on a train, there’s nowhere to go, no way to get help, but also super limited places to stash a teenage girl. Even when they arrive at St Pancras, with the millions of CCTV cameras everywhere, they still can’t rescue Freya from her captors without problems. And when you learn what it is the kidnappers want, and how totally beyond Mark and Claire’s normal life things have become, it’s jaw dropping.
Utterly gripping, very clever and filled with so many twists, you’ll be up all night!
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 