The Passenger

Lutz, Lisa. The Passenger. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2016. Print.

First Sentences:

When I found my husband at the bottom of the stairs, I tried to resuscitate him before I ever considered disposing of the body.

I pumped his barrel chest and blew into his purple lips. It was the first time in years that our lips had touched and I didn't recoil. 

Description:

In Lisa Lutz's compelling thriller, The Passenger, we meet "Tonya" standing at the bottom of the stairs of her home. Her husband has just fallen down the stairs to his accidental death, but Tonya feels the police will blame her. Worse yet, they might discover her true identity and name. So she takes to the road and changes her name, actions we soon learn she has been doing for the past ten years.

Along the way she stops in backwoods towns, meeting several people of questionable pasts like her own, and flees each location just before she is questioned too deeply. But what exactly are her secrets? 

Author Lutz follows Tonya/Amelia/Debra/Emma/Sonia/Paige/Jo closely through her stream of consciousness narration and inner thoughts. We readers are sitting next to this seemingly normal yet elusive character as she makes up new identities and continues to run with no real plans for a future except to keep moving ahead of discovery. There is even another killing, which definitely complicates Tonya's life and any hope of regaining her former peaceful life. 

If you murder someone once, even with a tenuous argument for self-defense, you can blame it on chance, being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong name. But the next time you kill someone, you have to start asking the hard questions. Is it really self-defense or a lifestyle choice? 

But there are hints about her history. Short email correspondence from the past years are revealed that were sent between Tonya and "Ryan," someone who seems to be a friend from the past but also seems to be an enemy who can no longer be trusted. Through these notes, vague hints are given to tease readers about what happened to make Tonya hit the road and never look back.

How long can she survive without much money? Where will she stop next? What identity will she create for herself? Who can she trust? Tonya is an extremely complex character, yet her thoughts reveal her as someone not so different from anyone else. Awkward circumstances and feelings of self-preservation have dictated the course of her life over the last decade, and we ache to see her triumph somehow and be freed from the questionable events of her past.

Highly recommended for its crisp writing and dialogue, as well as a clever story that holds one in suspense up to the very last pages, my favorite kind of tale.

Happy reading. 


Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Mackintosh, Clare. I Let You Go.

A woman involved in a tragic car accident that killed a small child disappears with a new name and life on an isolated coastal village, trying to hide avoid the past catching up with her.. (previously reviewed here)