Riding the rollercoaster

Have you ever watched a 1940s noir film and been drawn into a storyline involving a character whose malevolent intent has unleashed a trajectory towards an inevitably nightmarish conclusion? That sense of impending doom is the feeling you get reading bestselling author Louise Candlish’s rollercoaster new thriller The Other Passenger. The chain of events begins when Kit, who always commutes to work on the river bus with his older friend Jamie, doesn’t turn up. From there, events spiral out of control in a gripping, unsettling narrative that will have readers glued to the pages.

‘I’d been wanting to do an update on the old noir classics like Double Indemnity in a setting that hadn’t been done before, put a spin on an old-style mystery with fraud and seduction and a femme fatale,’ says Louise. ‘I like to take the conventions and twist them.’

delivers, thrillingly, in spades. It ticks all the noir boxes. There’s a dark, urban setting, fraudsters on the make, an irresistible temptress, a plot where each twist and turn increases the feeling of a net closing in. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, though, there’s no sense of this noir being vintage, retro or shadily nostalgic. It’s set in contemporary London, conveying the greed and resentment caused by the hike in property prices that means it’s near impossible for millennials to