REVIEW: 6:40 to Montreal by Eva Jurczyk

JennieB- Reviews / Book Reviewslocked room mystery / mystery / Suspense / thriller11 Comments

No WiFi, no distractions. No way out…

Agatha’s husband has bought her a first-class ticket on the scenic six-hour train from Toronto to Montreal as a gift?a one-day writing retreat so she can get some serious work done on her new book, a highly-anticipated follow-up to Agatha’s runaway bestseller debut novel. The first-class car is the perfect place to be productive, with only a handful of other passengers, plenty of snacks and drinks, and beautiful views flying by outside the window.

But Agatha has other plans for her day out… plans that are unexpectedly derailed when the train breaks down in the middle of the frigid Canadian woods and one of Agatha’s fellow passengers dies quietly in his seat. Soon, a pleasant morning in transit turns into a fight for survival against an unknown and unseen enemy. Will Agatha? or any of the passengers? make it out alive?

I found the above blurb really intriguing – snowbound passengers trapped on a train car and a cheekily named author protagonist – and so I went into this with high hopes. While those high hopes were let down, by what I consider bad plotting, this book did hold my attention and kept me turning the pages.

Agatha has a lot going on – she is a former bank manager who hit it big with her first novel, a mystery featuring a murderous yoga instructor. She’s also a cancer patient whose form of cancer – melanoma – is expected to kill her, sooner or later. This has sent Agatha into a despair that makes connecting with her husband and young son difficult, and working on her follow up novel impossible. For Christmas, her husband has bought her a ticket on the scenic train from Toronto to Montreal; the idea is that she will write on the train (six hours each way), and have a break in the middle to visit an old friend for lunch while she’s in Montreal. Agatha actually has other plans for her time in Montreal, though what those plans are is unclear at first.

The first class car is sparsely populated: an arrogant older businessman who gets on the train ranting into a phone, apparently about his contentious divorce; a mother and her college-age son, returning home for the winter holiday; an older gentleman that Agatha identifies as a “gentle giant.”

Then there’s the conductor, Dorcas, who when we meet her is walking Vivienne, the mother of the mother-son pair, through emergency procedures (I’m not a train traveler but I guess Vivienne is sitting in the equivalent of the airplane emergecy row). Dorcas has a silent trainee with her, one who mysteriously disappears before the train departs.

Then there is Cyanne. Cyanne doesn’t reveal herself until the train has taken off, and Agatha is immediately suspicious that she’s been followed. Cyanne is a former friend and co-worker from earlier in Agatha’s life; their relationship deteriorated long before Agatha’s book came out. But when it did come out, and unexpectedly hit it big, Cyanne emerged from the past, loudly proclaiming that Agatha had clearly based her murderous yoga instructor on her, Cyanne, a presumably not-murderous yoga instructor. She’s been a thorn in Agatha’s side ever since, and now Agatha’s trapped on a train with her.

Agatha is seated next to Finch, the ferociously unlikable businessman, and ends up giving up her seat and moving across the aisle, since 1) Finch apparently covets her seat 2) she doesn’t want to sit next to him and 3) the train car, with only six passengers and one conductor, clearly is roomy enough for everyone to spread out as they wish. There are events that make the seat switch more important to the plot than it would otherwise be, though.

Things start to go wrong when the train abruptly stops on a snowy, desolate stretch of wilderness with no wifi or chance of going for help. Dorcas reassures the passengers that the train will start again momentarily, but that claim is tested as the hours begin to stretch out. Eventually it is discovered that one of the passengers has died, and then, a bit later, it becomes clear that the death was not natural. Add in a medical emergency for another passenger and the increasing hostility Cyanne directs at Agatha, and things devolve quickly.

I thought the writing and characterization in 6:40 to Montreal were both well done. Early on, Agatha isn’t quite likable – she’s a little too cynical and angry (with reason, to be sure!) for that. But she’s an engaging and mostly smart protagonist. The other folks on the train car are brought to life through Agatha’s incisive author’s eye. Cyanne is particularly entertaining – she’s amusing in her single-minded anger towards Agatha (which, it turns out, is more justified than it first seems) and it takes a while to realize that she is not bright nor emotionally mature. Vivienne is particularly sympathetic as an overprotective mother who really starts to lose it when her son’s wellbeing is threatened.

The good parts of the book make it all the more disappointing that the plotting was beyond-acceptably-absurd. When I’m really engrossed in a story I can accept a LOT of absurdity, but this wasn’t quite THAT good, and the absurdity was really, really absurd.

Start with a murder committed in such an inefficient and chancy way (a murder in which Agatha improbably immediately identifies the murder weapon, in a way that’s never explained). Much later on when Agatha figures everything out, one realizes that the killer was standing in plain sight early on and Agatha could have identified them at any time. This is the type of thing that happens sometimes in suspense that really takes me out of the story – like I guess there is supposed to be tension in the possibility of discovery (though in this case the tension is non-existent since you don’t find out about the killer’s presence until much later). I can accept some fantastic elements in suspense but I still like people to act like…people, more or less. In this case, the killer’s choices made no sense to me.

I was also confused about how isolated the people in the railway car were from the other cars, where presumably there are people who could help when things start to go south. Dorcas tells everyone that the doors lock automatically in a power outage, which….say it with me…made no sense. Why would that be feature of the train security? What if there were a fire?

It never seems to occur to the group to try to get off the train to get the attention of people in other cars from the outside, if they can’t move through the cars. There is a raging blizzard, of course, but that doesn’t stop them from eventually leaving the train – it’s just that they do that thinking they will “go for help” – even though they know there are no houses or other buildings nearby. Still not considering the other passengers who are right there.

By the end, it’s quite clear that Agatha is not a good person. I didn’t mind her being cynical and angry, but her attitude toward another character’s death was chilling and just a bit too dark for me.

The motivation of the killer remained unclear to me. I am not sure if it was meant to be unclear? There were aspects of the story where it was hard to tell if it was just bad plotting or something intentional that I didn’t understand.

This is another “hard to grade” book because in spite of what I saw as big flaws, it was entertaining enough to read (this is kind of the story of my life with suspense novels). I think it’s a B- for me.

Best,

Jennie

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Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

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