Confessions on the 7:45 by Lisa Unger

  

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery, Psychological Suspense, Thriller
Content: Strong language; sex on a few occasions is described, but not in great detail

 

Selena Murphy is commuting home on the train when she strikes up a conversation with a beautiful stranger in the next seat. The woman introduces herself as Martha and soon confesses that she’s been stuck in an affair with her boss. Selena, in turn, confesses that she suspects her husband is sleeping with the nanny. When the train arrives at Selena’s station, the two women part ways, presumably never to meet again.

Then the nanny disappears.

As Selena is pulled into the mystery of what happened, and as the fractures in her marriage grow deeper, she begins to wonder, who was Martha really? But she is hardly prepared for what she’ll discover…

 

“Sometimes a stranger was the safest place in your life.” 

This was obviously inspired by Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith, and that's what drew me to it. I do need to admit that I haven't actually read Strangers on a Train yet, but I have seen the Hitchcock movie, and I liked it very much. So, any comparisons I made were based off the movie, and not the book. One thing that I liked about Strangers on a Train is the way the main character realizes that the man he met on the train is actually carrying out the "make believe" plan that was hatched on the train. This book went about things differently, and I didn't really feel that it had the same impact. That being said, I still enjoyed reading this very much. 

There were some crazy twists and turns in this and although I saw most of them coming, I wasn't bothered by that. The character, Selena bothered me a bit though, because I felt like she did some things that weren't very plausible. The biggest one was not seeing the huge red flags when the stranger she met on the train started contacting her. She had no idea how the woman got her number in the first place. This should have creeped her out. It was weird stalker-like behavior, but Selena eventually actually goes to meet this woman somewhere. After meeting her she gets what could be a plausible explanation of how the woman got her number, but I don't think anyone in their right mind would have gone to meet the woman in the first place.

Overall, for a book that was inspired by a classic, I think it was good. It can be hard to live up to the original material, and maybe I liked this as much as I did because I didn't really expect it to. It was good as something that was inspired by a classic, but was also a story of its own, that I found compelling, if a little implausible at times. If you like psychological suspense then I recommend giving this one a try.