Hostage – Clare Mackintosh
You can save hundreds of lives.
Or the one that matters most …
The atmosphere on board the inaugural non-stop flight from London to Sydney is electric. Numerous celebrities are rumoured to be among the passengers in business class and journalists will be waiting on the ground to greet the plane.
Mina is one of a hand-picked team of flight attendants chosen for the landmark journey. She’s trying to focus on the task in hand, and not worry about her troubled five-year-old daughter back at home with her husband. Or the cataclysmic problems in her marriage.
But the plane has barely taken off when Mina receives a chilling note from an anonymous passenger, someone intent on ensuring the plane never reaches its destination. Someone who needs Mina’s assistance and who knows exactly how to make her comply.
It’s twenty hours to landing.
A lot can happen in twenty hours …
I received a review copy from the publisher before taking part in the blog tour. I was invited to join the tour by Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours. My thanks to both.
As the summer holiday season is upon us many readers will be looking for the books they can stuff into a suitcase or their hand luggage. The smart cookies out there will have an ebook and a reading app on their phone. Nothing says “prepared” like opening the Kindle App when you suddenly find you are in a 3 hour airport queue. The really smart cookies out there will be taking Clare Mackintosh’s Hostage with them on their holiday – though some may find it a bit too intense to read on a flight!
I am keeping a firm eye on the blurb (above) as I try to explain why you must be reading Hostage this summer. The last thing I want to be doing is sprinkling spoilers into my review as this really is a book you want to pick up with as little advance warning of what is about to unfold as it is possible to achieve.
The key character in Hostage is Mina. She is a flight attendant who will be working on a landmark journey: an England to Australia direct flight. Pushing the boundaries of aviation capability means a 20 hour flight with no stops. For the crew it should be a long and demanding trip, the flight will be full of celebs, reporters along with the usual quota of people making the epic journey with their own personal ambitions and aspirations driving them on.
Mina didn’t need to be on the flight – for all the prestige involved in being on board it was deemed a “short straw” by the crew. Yet Mina volunteered to swap with a friend. She has been having a really tough time at home, her marriage seemingly falling apart due to her husband’s unreliable nature. Their five year old daughter is the light of their lives but she is also a lot of work for Mina when Adam (Mina’s husband) isn’t pulling his weight. Mina will get some time away on the round trip and Adam will just need to cope.
Unfortunately for Mina someone has been paying too much attention to her personal situation and with the flight in the air she receives a note which will rock her world to its core. Someone on the flight plans to ensure the hightest profile air trip of a generation will never reach its destination and they need Mina to make that possible.
I really cannot go into too much more detail but I can tell you from the moment Mina’s flight takes to the air this book will have you gripped and you will not want to stop reading. Claire Mackintosh builds up the background so smoothly and weaves important narrative into scenes where the reader may not appreceiate their significance. Aside from Mina and her family there are interludes where she introduces passengers and shares their stories. These passengers will also be caught-up in the drama as if the plane does not reach its destination and knowing what they have at stake is crucial to buying into the tension.
Hostage is the first of Claire Mackintosh’s books I have read. But having been in the audience at events to hear her speak, I already owned a few of her earlier books. Kicking myself for not making time to read those books sooner but a thriller of this quality is not a fluke and I cannot wait to catch up on the titles I missed. Those will be MY summer holiday reads.
Hostage is available in paperback, digital and audiobook format you can order a copy here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/hostage/clare-mackintosh/9780751577082