Book Review: The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian

I have read a few of Bohjalian's books and enjoyed most of them.  The Flight Attendant definitely fell into that category.

Cassie is a flight attendant laying over in Dubai.  She hooks up with a passenger she met on the flight and gets blackout drunk. This isn't unusual behavior for Cassie. When she wakes up, she remembers sharing a bottle of vodka with a female visitor that this man worked with, she remembers the sex, and she remembers leaving to go back to her hotel.  So why is she waking up still in this man's room?  And why is he dead in bed next to her -- his throat slashed?

Cassie takes a shower to wash off the blood, tries to clean up all her fingerprints, and leaves to catch her flight back to the states. Things slowly begin to fall apart for Cassie, and thankfully she does retain an attorney pretty early in the process. But she's pretty stupid at times and doesn't always follow her attorney's advice.  And when pictures show up with a woman wearing the exact scarf Cassie purchased in Dubai, it seems everyone knows Cassie isn't telling the truth.

When she does tell the truth (or most of it), it doesn't help.  Basically, Cassie is a mess.  And the fact that the man she was with might have been a spy, and the woman that was a guest that evening doesn't seem to exist, puts Cassie in a different kind of danger she never anticipated.

I was easily wrapped up in The Flight Attendant, and rooted for Cassie, even as she continued to blunder through her situation. The pacing is good and Bohjalian has a gift for description. My only complaint is the ending.  There is an epilogue, but I wish the story had gone another step before the epilogue.  I felt like, "Wait....What??" I didn't quite understand how Cassie got where she was, and exactly what was her situation.  Maybe it was just a bit too sinister and twisted for me?  I needed an explanation.

I would recommend The Flight Attendant, and also that you go back and read Bohjalian's The Night Strangers and The Sleepwalker, a couple of my favorites. The Flight Attendant contains lots of promiscuity and sex, but nothing graphic.  Reserve this one for older teens.

Published by Doubleday, March 13, 2018
eARC obtained from Edelweiss
368 pages

Rating: 4/5

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