It’s more than a decade since Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train was published, storming the book world and arguably reinventing the thriller. Room 706, this year’s early contender for a twisty page-turner, moves away from the unreliable narrator trope Hawkins so deftly reinvigorated, but it does boast an intriguing concept that grabs you from the outset.
The set up is simple. We meet Kate, a mother of two young children, in a hotel room on a weekday afternoon. She’s about to check out and do the school run, when a hostage situation begins to unfold outside her door. She’s stuck inside, terrified of what the terrorists will do.
The complication? She’s there with a man who isn’t her husband. If she’s caught by the terrorists, will she also be caught in her web of lies?
Despite her affair, Kate is a sympathetic character, and we learn what and why has led her to this point. She takes us back to the start of her relationship with her husband Vic, a kind and loving man whom she met at her lowest ebb. Their romance has not yet run its course, but Kate has always wondered about paths not taken, even as her family has grown.
We see how a chance meeting with an older businessman called James became an affair almost by accident, and how carefully Kate has compartmentalised her life to facilitate it. We also see how the early loss of her mother has shaped the choices she has made as an adult.
For all that this is a hostage situation, there are no ticking bombs or SWAT teams. Instead, the tension rises in Kate’s mind, as she oscillates between writing emotive goodbye letters to her children and worrying about whether Vic knows the supermarket shopping password or what to get their son for Christmas. The external threat is looming, but Kate – cosseted in a hotel room, with just a mobile phone connecting her and James to the outside world – is consumed by fear not just for survival but that her personal life is about to come crashing down.
James’s character is a little one-note; a more ambitious version of the story might have told it from his side too, but that’s a small criticism. What works so well with Room 706, just as it did with The Girl on the Train, is that we can all imagine ourselves in the situation; we can all put ourselves in Kate’s shoes. And while infidelity might not be an issue for every reader, all of us will have private lives that we wouldn’t want exposed. A gripping thriller to get you through the winter weeks.
Room 706, by Ellie Levenson
Hachette
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