The Flight Attendant
By Chris Bohjalian
Doubleday Books, 9780385542418, March 2018, 368pp.

The Short of It:

An intoxicated flight attendant with an insatiable appetite for men, goes on a bender and wakes up next to a corpse.

The Rest of It:

Flight attendants visit some pretty exotic places but even with all that promise of adventure, things can be pretty routine while on the job. For Cassie, flirting with the passengers is pretty routine. Sneaking shots of vodka while working is also pretty routine and finding a guy to sleep with as soon as you land? Also pretty routine.

Cassie arranges to meet one of the passengers from her flight for dinner and drinks. Dubai has many luxurious bars and hotels but her only requirement is that the rest of her crew need not know any of it. It’s none of their business anyway, right? So when she wakes up next to Alex, a hedge fund manager whom she hardly knows, and sees the gaping wound to his neck, she panics because she cannot remember the evening and wonders if she was the one to murder him. Was she?

Cassandra Bowden’s alcoholic tendencies is what lands her in trouble but even sober, Cassie is not someone you feel sorry for because she’s somewhat calculated and makes really stupid mistakes over and over again. She is very hard to like and in the end, you won’t like her but that’s okay because the story still had me turning those pages.

However, the story has its weak moments. It’s a little repetitive. She gets drunk often and like The Girl on the Train, I tired of it quickly. I feel like the story could have taken many different directions which was good because I couldn’t tell how it would end but the ending was not realistic to me.

This is a book that I enjoyed purely for its page-turning lure. You’ll want to know the outcome and there are enough setbacks and wild moments to keep you guessing.

Have you read it? What did you think?

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
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