Welcome to Reading, Reading, Reading!

As you may know, John Marrs has quickly become one of my new favourite authors of all time. His mystery/thriller novels are practically perfect in every way (movie reference, anybody?)! For the second half of 2020, I am going to try to get through all of John Marrs backlist publications, making this one the second Marrs book I have read this year. And boy oh boy, it did NOT disappoint!

Synopsis (Goodreads.com):

Eight self-drive cars set on a collision course. Who lives, who dies? You decide.
When someone hacks into the systems of eight self-drive cars, their passengers are set on a fatal collision course.
The passengers are: a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife – and parents of two – who are travelling in separate vehicles and a suicidal man. Now the public have to judge who should survive but are the passengers all that they first seem?

This book was UNREAL. With every John Marrs book I read, I am more and more impressed by his writing and unpredictable plot twists. He seems to have gotten the thrilling aspect down to a tee, and his plot twists for exceptional mysterious aspects.

The Passengers features a very interesting cast of characters. Quickly, readers realize that everyone involved in this event has a secret to hide, and while I was expecting the secrets to be very basic (murder, money laundering, etc.), these ones were actually very complex and unexpected. Each of the secrets helped to further develop the characters, and they added to the uniqueness of this book.

Within this story, I found so many tropes that I love to read in novels, including an element of tech, majority of the story taking place over a small period of time, and a romance element that does not take over the whole story, just to name a few. Since this story was so plot driven, it was necessary for Marrs to include a lot of different tropes to help advance the plot of the story, and I thought that the ones he chose were not only interesting, but also executed so well.

I think this book would make a phenomenal movie adaptation, as the majority of the story takes place over only a few hours during one day. The technological aspect would be so interesting to see play out on TV, and I know the characters could easily be cast. I hope that after The One gets put on Netflix, Netflix will think about creating The Passengers into a movie!

And of course, I ended up giving this book 5/5 stars. Out all of the John Marrs books I have read so far, this one was my favourite!

Good Night Book Owls!