Unpopular take. I am not a writer, far from it, but I don’t know what people are thinking when they write thrillers with not one redeeming or relatable character. It’s weird and off-putting. What it does to me as a reader is just disconnect from everyone in the book. I may read it compulsively because of all the head-spinning twists and turns, but in the end, I find I do not care very much. Twists do not make a book memorable, characters do.
This is exactly the problem with The Commuter.
About The Commuter
I killed him.
Rachel Gordon wakes up from an induced coma following a car accident to the news that her much older husband, Anthony, has died at their home, and her immediate reaction is guilt.
The police also seem convinced she must have been involved. But Rachel can’t actually remember any of the past month.
She has flashes of a man she met on her regular commute to work by tube. But there’s no other evidence he exists. Did they have an affair? Could he have been responsible for Anthony’s death? Or is Rachel guilty of something else altogether? And will she discover the truth in time to save herself?
~ Synopsis from goodreads
My Review
This book is an engaging, pacey, twisty, and compelling read. It is full of red herrings and untrustworthy characters, so it definitely scores high on the chills and thrills level.
Where it misses the boat is a strong protagonist or antagonist. All the characters are hateful. I really wanted to get behind Rachel Gordon, but she is hard to like. She was the other woman in her husband’s life before he left his wife for her. There’s an uncomfortable and awkward stepmother/stepdaughter dynamic between her and Anthony’s daughter, Caroline, that I wish had been fleshed out more. Her husband Anthony just seems like a weird, controlling person, with random bursts of anger. In short, I feel this book is let down by the half-baked character sketches.
The so-called mysterious commuter angle made the book suspenseful, but none of the plot points come together well enough. And the ending was just abyssmal. After all the twists and turns, this was not the ending I wanted to land at.
I generally tend to like thrillers quite easily, but this one was hard. The vibes are very The Girl on the Train, but it falls short just because of some increasingly bizarre twists.
