Blog Tour and Review: What She Saw Last Night – MJ Cross

Welcome back!

I’m so pleased to have been invited to participate in the blog tour for What She Saw Last Night. Don’t forget to check out the blog tour schedule for other wonderful posts on this tour. Many thanks to Orion and Tracy from Compulsive Readers.

What She Saw Last Night

Synopsis

No one will believe … WHAT SHE SAW LAST NIGHT.
Jenny Bowen is going home. Boarding the Caledonian Sleeper, all she wants to do is forget about her upcoming divorce and relax on the ten-hour journey through the night.
In her search for her cabin, Jenny helps a panicked woman with a young girl she assumes to be her daughter. Then she finds her compartment and falls straight to sleep.
Waking in the night, Jenny discovers the woman dead in her cabin … but there’s no sign of the little girl. The train company have no record of a child being booked on the train, and CCTV shows the dead woman boarding alone.
The police don’t believe Jenny, and soon she tries to put the incident out of her head and tells herself that everyone else is right: she must have imagined the little girl.
But deep down, she knows that isn’t the truth.

Review

I love any book that takes place on a train. From the minute I finished Murder on the Orient Express for the first time, I was hooked on the romantic notion of travelling on luxury trains through the night. So when I was asked to review What She Saw Last Night, they had me at ‘Caledonian Sleeper’.

What She Saw Last Night is a fantastically fast-paced thriller, which really doesn’t slow down until the bitter end! Train-love aside, I think the pace of this book was one of the best aspects of this book as it always gives you a reason to keep going and pick the book back up again.

I’ll be totally honest with you, whenever I pick up a book by a male author writing a female protagonist, I always go in slightly cautiously – I’ve had too many experiences where the author has written the woman as some super attractive, busty, heel-wearing business woman/wife/mother. However, I am thankful to report that Cross is not one of these authors.

His protagonist, Jenny, is intelligent, doesn’t suffer fools and wonderfully independent. Maybe she could do with being a bit more risk averse but you’ll have to read the book to find out why.

I had some emotional ups and downs with this book; occasionally, despite the fast pace, I found my interest dipping slightly only then to be hit square in the face with a major plot twist, one of which really did give me the shivers.

The only thing I found slightly problematic about this book (and I do mean slightly) was I struggled to understand the protagonist’s motivations. I felt like I wanted to get to know her better and would’ve enjoyed more of a backstory.

In all, this is a solid book for crime thriller fans and I would highly recommend getting it in ready for the long winter nights ahead.