About this item
Servants and socialites sip cocktails side by side on their way to new lives in this "thrilling, seductive, and utterly absorbing" (Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author) historical suspense novel in the tradition of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile and Ken Follett's Night Over Water.The ship has been like a world within itself, a vast floating city outside of normal rules. But the longer the journey continues, the more confined it is starting to feel, deck upon deck, passenger upon passenger, all of them churning around each other without anywhere to go... 1939: Europe is on the brink of war when young Lily Shepherd boards an ocean liner in Essex, bound for Australia. She is ready to start anew, leaving behind the shadows in her past. The passage proves magical, complete with live music, cocktails, and fancy dress balls. With stops at exotic locations along the way - Naples, Cairo, Ceylon - the voyage shows Lily places she'd only ever dreamed of and enables her to make friends with those above her social station, people who would ordinarily never give her the time of day. She even allows herself to hope that a man she couldn't possibly have a future with outside the cocoon of the ship might return her feelings. But Lily soon realizes that she's not the only one hiding secrets. Her newfound friends - the toxic wealthy couple Eliza and Max; Cambridge graduate Edward; Jewish refugee Maria; fascist George - are also running away from their pasts. As the glamour of the voyage fades, the stage is set for something sinister to occur. By the time the ship docks, two passengers are dead, war has been declared, and Lily's life will be changed irrevocably.
About the Author
Hello and thank you for visiting the author page of Rachel Rhys - though you might also know me as psychological thriller writer Tammy Cohen.People always ask why I write under two names. As with most things, there's no simple answer.Initially I felt that having separate identities for the two very different genres - contemporary psychological suspense and historical mystery - would make it easier for readers to be sure exactly what they were getting.But what I hadn't really expected was that adopting a new name would also free me up to write in a completely new (for me) way. What I hadn't expected was how liberating it would be!My first Rachel Rhys, Dangerous Crossing, was inspired by a handprinted and photocopied journal I found while rummaging through my mum's cupboards. It had been written by a friend of my mum's and recounted a voyage she'd taken in 1938 on an ocean liner travelling from London to Sydney, courtesy of the government's reduced passage scheme aimed at encouraging young working class women to go into service in Australia. The journal detailed every aspect of everyday life on board the ship - from the menus to the Fancy Dress balls to the social and political tensions among the passengers in this volatile pre-war period. I knew instantly it would make a fabulous backdrop for a novel. What if something terrible happened on board that ship, amid all that unrest, all that enforced leisure, all those passengers who could not escape each other? When I started writing it as me, in my usual contemporary style, it felt all wrong somehow. Psychological thrillers are immediate and fast paced with a relentless escalation of suspense. This book seemed to call for a gentler approach, with more time taken to evoke the setting and draw out the characters, building up a sense of the period, with the tension woven lightly through using the most silken of threadsI decided I needed to start over again to develop a fresh style - and so Rachel was born.Whereas my psychological thrillers tend to be domestic based and therefore quite insular and claustrophobic, Rachel Rhys was free to explore the world, escaping from the monotony of everyday life to sip cocktails on hotel terraces in 1940s Antibes, or sun herself on white sand beaches in 1950s pre-revolution Cuba. Rather than travelling inwards to mine the darkness of their own psyches, her protagonists set out across the world on jet planes and ocean liners and the famous Train Bleu with its starched white tablecloths and wood panelled couchettes. And as they travel, they shed the constraints of their humdrum pasts as domestic servants and bored housewives and typists and start daring to imagine a future in which they make their own choices - where to live, what to do, who or even if to marry. Along the way there are mysteries to solve and flamboyant characters to encounter and mimosas to be drunk and silks to be worn. There are sunsets over mountains and palm trees whisp
