About the Book
The glittering RMS Queen Mary. A nightclub singer on the run. An aristocratic family with secrets worth killing for.
London, 1936. Lena Aldridge wonders if life has passed her by. The dazzling theatre career she hoped for hasn’t worked out. Instead, she’s stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho, and her married lover has just left her. But Lena has always had a complicated life, one shrouded in mystery as a mixed-race girl passing for white in a city unforgiving of her true racial heritage.
She’s feeling utterly hopeless until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York. After a murder at the club, the timing couldn’t be better, and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. But death follows her onboard when an obscenely wealthy family draws her into their fold just as one among them is killed in a chillingly familiar way. As Lena navigates the Abernathy’s increasingly bizarre family dynamic, she realizes that her greatest performance won’t be for an audience, but for her life.
With seductive glamor, simmering family drama, and dizzying twists, Louise Hare makes her beguiling US debut.
My Review
I’m not always the biggest historical fiction fan, but every once in a while I feel drawn to a storyline. I’m guessing my fasciation with ships and the glamour of some of their passengers from the 1930s was what made me say yes to this review – and a little mystery doesn’t hurt either. While there were parts I enjoyed – and the ending in particular was making me sweat – the pace was fairly slow and hard to get in to. I liked Lena and thought she made for an interesting heroine, and of course seeing how different the times were is always of intrigue to me. The Abernathy family does indeed seem quite bizarre, and it was a little hard to follow their ways at times. About halfway through – and after an extreme plot twist – things started to pick up, but the closing of the story was a let down for me. There didn’t seem to be any conclusion to this drawn-out premise, no consequences, it just – was over. While there were parts I liked about the novel – the talk of fashion, the setting of the ship – overall it was a bit of a miss for me.
3 stars
