Crime Book Club – Video and Vote

The virtual crime book club met on Monday to discuss Bad Men by Julie Mae Cohen. We were very lucky to have Julie attend for the first twenty minutes for a Q&A on her book, the characters and her writing process. Lucky because I forgot to email and ask her until the day before! So huge thanks to Julie for coming to talk to us. You can watch the Q&A and the discussion after on the video below. Be aware it is filled with spoilers so don’t watch if you’re still reading the book or are yet to read it.

For our next book we are reading a crime/thriller set on a plane. It may come as no surprise that there were more of these books than I initially thought there’d be, considering the tension being in a tin can in the sky can elicit. 

The next meeting is 8 p.m. BST on Monday 16th September. If you have not yet joined the book club but wish to take part, you can sign up HERE – necessary to obtain login details for the meeting. 

Now a decision has to be made on what book we are reading. Please check out the books listed below, read the blurbs and leave your vote in a comment at the end. I look forward to seeing what we’re reading next.

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

A woman is killed by a poisoned dart in the enclosed confines of a commercial passenger plane. Flying from Paris to London.

From seat No.9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers. Over to his right sat a pretty young woman, clearly infatuated with the man opposite; ahead, in seat No.13, sat a Countess with a poorly-concealed cocaine habit; across the gangway in seat No.8, a detective writer was being troubled by an aggressive wasp. What Poirot did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No.2, sat the slumped, lifeless body of a woman.

How could this happen with the world’s No. 1 private detective on board?

The Pilots Daughter by Audrey J Cole

Welcome aboard Pacific Air Flight 385, with nonstop service from Seattle to Honolulu.

Cora is scared to fly again after her husband died in a recent helicopter crash in Pago Pago.

A thousand times she has told herself to turn around, not get on the flight, go back to her young children.

But now, she’s seated in first class across the aisle from the girlfriend of a famous billionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur.

Halfway across the Pacific, the flight is hijacked. Six people are dead—including the pilots.

Cora is a young widow, mother, and emergency room nurse…but as the world closes in around her, she’s also a pilot’s daughter.

Lost off radar in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, the motive behind the hijacking remains a mystery. Not knowing who to trust, Cora works with the man seated beside her, Seattle Homicide Detective Kyle Adams, to save herself along with the remaining one hundred and forty-two souls on board.

Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

You can save hundreds of lives.
Or the one that matters most…

The atmosphere on board the inaugural non-stop flight from London to Sydney is electric. Numerous celebrities are rumoured to be among the passengers in business class and journalists will be waiting on the ground to greet the plane.

Mina is one of a hand-picked team of flight attendants chosen for the landmark journey. She’s trying to focus on the task in hand, and not worry about her troubled five-year-old daughter back at home with her husband. Or the cataclysmic problems in her marriage.

But the plane has barely taken off when Mina receives a chilling note from an anonymous passenger, someone intent on ensuring the plane never reaches its destination. Someone who needs Mina’s assistance and who knows exactly how to make her comply.

It’s twenty hours to landing.
A lot can happen in twenty hours…

Seat 7a by Sebastian Fitzek

Psychiatrist Mats Krüger knows that his irrational fear of flying is just that – irrational. He knows that flying is nineteen times safer than driving. He also knows that if something does happen on a plane, the worst place to be is seat 7A. That’s why on his first plane journey in 20 years – to be with his only daughter as she gives birth – he’s booked seat 7A, so no one else can sit there. If no one is sat there, surely nothing will go wrong.

But shortly after take-off, Mats receives a worrying phone call. The caller has kidnapped his daughter and will murder her – and her unborn child – unless Mats convinces the pilot to crash the plane, killing everyone on board.

As the plane nears its destination, Mats must make an impossible choice and face the fact he might be the arbiter of his own worst fear.

 

 

The Flight by Julie Clark (Aka The Last Flight)

Two women. Two Flights. One last chance to disappear.

Claire Cook has a perfect life. Married to the scion of a political dynasty, with a Manhattan townhouse and a staff of ten, her surroundings are elegant, her days flawlessly choreographed, and her future auspicious. But behind closed doors, nothing is quite as it seems. That perfect husband has a temper that burns as bright as his promising political career, and he’s not above using his staff to track Claire’s every move, making sure she’s living up to his impossible standards. But what he doesn’t know is that Claire has worked for months on a plan to vanish.

A chance meeting in an airport bar brings her together with a woman whose circumstances seem equally dire. Together they make a last-minute decision to switch tickets — Claire taking Eva’s flight to Oakland, and Eva traveling to Puerto Rico as Claire. They believe the swap will give each of them the head start they need to begin again somewhere far away. But when the flight to Puerto Rico goes down, Claire realizes it’s no longer a head start but a new life. Cut off, out of options, with the news of her death about to explode in the media, Claire will assume Eva’s identity, and along with it, the secrets Eva fought so hard to keep hidden.