Nadz@Totally Addicted to Reading
Written on May 23, 2023
The Woman in Carriage 3 introduces readers to twenty-nine-year-old Harriett aka Hattie, whose life is a train wreck. She’s always drunk, can’t hold down a job, lives with her parent and engages in casual sex with strangers. She travels on carriage 3 on the 18:35 train every evening. Hattie and the other passengers in carriage 3 are strangers. However, when a passenger suddenly dies, they bonded over the tragedy and soon began exchanging messages in a WhatsApp group. The growing friendship between this group of people from carriage 3 appears to be going well. Then one of them died while on the train. At first, it appeared to be death by natural causes, but then further investigation revealed murder. Who did it and why?
The story started out slow and gradually built up, keeping the reader wondering when Hattie would come to her senses. Although advertised as an addictive thriller, the story did not thrill me in the least. However, it made curious me to see if Hattie would finally get her life together and recognise she was being played.
It wasn’t hard to see where the story was going in terms of the mystery. After all, the suspect list was quite short. Also, my radar went up immediately with the appearance of two of the characters. I theorized these two were up to no good. Throughout the story, they proved my theory. James introduce an odd red herring, which unfortunately did not work as intended, as it was blatantly obvious as to whom the perpetrators were.
Although not the thriller I hoped The Woman in Carriage 3 would be, and despite the predictability, I still enjoyed the story. After all, I read it in less than a day.
This review was originally posted on Totally Addicted to Reading