From past experience, I wasn't sure that I liked olives very much, but Charlie already thought me naive on several counts, a state of affairs that I wasn't keen on. Unfortunately for this one, most of the books that I have read recently have used the format of going backwards and forwards in time so my heart sank when I found that this too used that format. This is one of those mysteries where I suspected everyone of everything by the end, assuming ill intent and secret motives on behalf of the whole cast.

Accompanying her is Charlie Bacon, the self-appointed promoter, who has promised her a role in a Broadway show due to the connections of her deceased father.But it just felt like it was underwritten, and certainly I needed more reasoning and feeling behind the choices that are made. I'd forgotten that if you turn your back and act as though you couldn't care less, they're as hard to get rid of as a white cat hair on your best black dress.

And while I also don't mind that Lena is not the detective and largely reacts to things throughout the story instead of acting--this felt right, as a passenger--I do think that at the end, we needed more of an emphatic statement and proactive decision-making from her. Lena isn’t just playing with identity here, in America it may have an impact on her ambitions and her place in society. The pacing is also wrong, I don’t know what the editor was thinking when they said yes, this is good, no need to change anything. To complete the picture of English gentility, there was a grand fireplace at the far end of the room, and they were doing a roaring trade in cocktails from the small bar.Central to events on the liner is the wealthy Abernathy family who Lena meets on the first night on board the luxury ship. I received an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley; this does not affect my rating nor my opinions in any way. Boarding the ship had been finely managed chaos, crowds of people everywhere as families roamed the dock, waiting to wave off their relatives, the Queen looming over us, regal and magnificent. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. However, she never really seems to go beyond the characters on the table and Hare does not make use of the closed shipboard setting as well as she could.