Happy publication day to Will Dean for The Last Passenger! Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for an early read. Before I give you my thoughts, here’s the blurb.
The Blurb
A luxury cruise liner, abandoned with no crew, steaming into the mid-Atlantic.
And you are the only passenger left on board.
Caz Ripley, a cafe owner from a small, ordinary town, boards the RMS Atlantica with her boyfriend Pete and a thousand fellow passengers destined for New York.
The next morning, she wakes to discover that everyone else on board has disappeared.
And that’s just the beginning. Caz must prepare for a crossing that will be anything but plain sailing …
My Review
I’m going to start this review by referring back to Bad Apples, one of Will Dean’s Tuva Moodyson’s books. In that story, we got to see what happens when Will lets his imagination run riot. He’s done something similar in The Last Passenger.
Caz Ripley is being whisked away by her partner, Pete, on a once-in-a-lifetime trip – crossing the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to New York. But after the first night on the ocean liner, Caz wakes up to find Pete gone, along with everyone else. Caz is the last passenger on board.
What follows is confusing and terrifying but Will Dean knows how much to give away and when to do so. It certainly wasn’t a calming read before bedtime! I don’t want to give away any of the plot though because it’s so important that readers find this out for themselves. What I will say though is, in the same vein of Bad Apples, Will Dean has written a controlled descent into chaos and madness. It’s deliciously clever, terrifically tense and has an ending that I hate him for. But this really is Will Dean at his absolute best.
You can buy The Last Passenger here.
The Author
Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of eighteen. After studying law at the LSE, and working many varied jobs in London, he settled in rural Sweden with his wife. He built a wooden house in a boggy forest clearing and it’s from this base that he compulsively reads and writes.
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