This book kept my attention but o wasn’t in love with it! The main character was super annoying and her “issues” drove me nuts. The other characters were great!

I absolutely LOOOVED this book. From the very page to the last, I was hooked. The constant back and forth of not knowing what truly happened that night kept me up late into the night. Chris Bohjalian knows how to write, and he knows how to write women. This book was an incredible thrill ride and I am sooo excited that it is going to be a show on TV soon.

This novel was very difficult than I thought it was going to be but it was still a page turner and I did enjoyed this very well. The writing was good and I really like the plot. This mystery was good and I would recommend it!

Flight attendant Cassie Bowden is a functioning alcoholic. While on a layover in Dubai, she wakes up next to the dead body of a first class passenger she’d hooked up with the night before. She’d blacked out and doesn’t remember what happened so she decides to leave without reporting his death. She’s scared and can’t wait to get back to the US so she can hire a lawyer. Things quickly escalate and Cassie finds herself in more trouble than she could ever have imagined.

Chris Bohjalian opens THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT with quite a hook and keeps the tension ratcheted up throughout the book. Cassie’s really not sure what happened that fateful night so readers aren’t either. I was hooked from the beginning and engrossed in this thriller throughout. I did have a few issues with the ending so I can’t say that I loved the book but I did like it a great deal.

I first want to say thank you to the author, publisher, and Netgalley for allowing me to preview this book. I was excited to get started and had heard a lot of buzz surrounding this title. I was disappointed to find that it did not hold my interest. I found it to be slightly boring, and it was a struggle to finish. I apologize for the harsh review, but that is my honest thought. It started out with a lot of promise, but I just feel like it did not deliver.

I was really hoping this book would renew an early love I have for Chris Bohjalian books, but no such luck. I think way to many authors are falling into the "Gone Girl" category trying to write thrillers that really don't deliver. I made it halfway through this one and felt I hadn't gotten anywhere!

All I know for sure, is I wouldn't want to be lying about murder in a place like Dubai. There are a lot of twists and Cassandra's alcohol use and partying muddies the waters.

This was my first book by Chris Bohjalian and although it was not faced paced I still thoroughly enjoyed it. The story line built and the suspense came at the right times.

The ending was surprising but not hit the floor shocking?

I never fully lost interest in the book but I do feel like it was missing something. I think it has to be the ending. I wanted more excitement and thrill and I was really let down.

Overall, it was a good read that I enjoyed for the most part.

Thank you Netgalley & the publisher for my free copy.

Well, that was something!

Cassie Bowden is a flight attendant living on pure alcohol and one night stands, filled up with many days of complete blackouts. One morning she wakes up with a terrible hangover in a Dubai hotel room with a dead man laying right beside her. There is blood everywhere - even all over her. Cassie has no idea what happened. This will be the day that will change her life! Who killed this man? Could it have been her?

The Flight Attendant is a great story that is told from two alternating points of view, that is slow to build, character-driven, and very intriguing. Looking forward to reading more of Chris Bohjalian's books. Highly recommend!

*Many thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book, though some parts of it were better paced than others. I thought the buildup of one of the villains felt oddly cut short, but I wound up enjoying the ending because it wasn't what you usually get from books like these. I haven't read this author, but I would give her another shot. Also, alcoholic or not, this is a cautionary tale for anyone who ever hooks up with people when they are out of town!

Like most good mysteries, The Flight Attendant not only had me wondering what happened, but why. When I was only halfway through the story, without answers to either question, I thought I lost access to my electronic copy of this novel. I spent months wondering "what ever happened" so I was elated to find that I could recover my copy! Perhaps this built up the suspense more than a normal situation but I was very pleased not just with knowing what happened but why and how. The ending did not disappoint. I will be looking into more novels by Mr. Bohjalian.

I had a hard time with this book. The premise sounded compelling but then when I learned that the main character was essentially set-up, I lost interest. I just wasn't interested in the other female character and her reasons for creating the plot. I unfortunately did not finish the book.

I had a lot of fun with this book! Great vacation thriller with tons of fun details about what it's like to work in the skies. The author knows when to linger in character development without sacrificing plot momentum.

The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian reads like an espionage thriller. However, the book is character driven more so than plot driven. The question for me is not why Alex Sokolov is killed but rather what is to become of the main characters – Cassie and Elena. The epilogue pushes the boundaries of believability, most markedly skipping over the challenges of dealing with alcoholism. However, until that point, the book is a page turner and an entertaining read.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2018/07/the-flight-attendant.html

Reviewed for NetGalley

The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian is a book that is simply not what it seems at first glance. I guess I should have expected such from his previous novel, The Guest Room. That also is a book that slowly and cleverly morphs into something different. The Flight Attendant follows the misadventure of Cassandra Bowden and her night of drunken sex that ends with terrifying consequences.

"...And there he was. For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body's utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. She saw the great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. He was flat on his back. She saw his neck, the yawning red trench from one side of his jaw to the other, and how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey..."

Cassandra is a binge drinker, so waking up with a strange man in bed with her and little to know memory of the night before is nothing new. Her job as a flight attendant makes these nights incredibly easy. Fly into a city, hit the bar in the hotel and let someone take her to bed. She's done it so often that she's made a lifestyle of it. Only this morning this man was not in the hotel bar. He was a passenger on the plane and people had seen them flirting with one another and now here he was. Naked. Dead. Murdered as she slept next to him after a long night of sex. Had she done it herself? She had been violent before when she was drunk. Not that she remembered but she had been told. If not her then who? What Cassandra knew what that she was hungover, with a dead body in the hotel room, in Dubai and with her flight home leaving in two hours.

Now Cassandra must do something else she's very good at. She lies. She lies to the other Attendants as they fly to Paris and then back to New York. She lies to the FBI and when the truth gets to close she gets an attorney and then she lies to her as well. But Cassandra begins to realize that perhaps the dead man is not just any dead man. She begins her own investigation but can she control her self destructive impulses?

"...I did something stupid last night?' she confessed, and she told Ani what had occured at the bar. But instead of firing or even chastising her, Ani sounded as if she had come to expect this sort of bad behavior from her client. There was an edge of disappointment to her response, but mostly she just sounded sad.
'Someday you'll hit bottom,' she said. 'For most people, that would have been Dubai. Not you, apparently. We'll see,'
'How much trouble am I in?' she asked.
'For calling the Sokolov family in Virginia? Oh, probably no more than yesterday. You should be embarrassed, but I'm not sure it's really possible to shame you, Cassie..."

Cassandra soons finds herself embroiled in a plot of espionage and assassinations and murder. All because of one drunken night. It soon becomes clear that her greatest worry is not that she is a suspect in the murder of a man in the hotel room in Dubai. But that she may be the next target.

Here is the thing, Cassie is an irresponsible bitch. Really and no this is not slut shaming. She could sleep around all she wants but there are parts in this book that she does things that are cruel and painful to other characters because it is just who she is. She hurts her own family, not to mention drunk prank calling the parents of a man who whose brutally murdered in a foreign country. She is really unlikable so it is to Bohjhalian's credit that we start to actually care about her. Cassie deserves the worst that can happen but we don't want it to happen to her. We want her to learn and redeem herself but she never does. She avoids and brushes it off until when finally she is staring into her own death, she can only lament how she came to this place. In the end Cassie is Cassie and she can never be anything else.

A terrific twist and turn book that refuses to be categorized as a thriller or as women's fiction. In the end it is not just the plot that has the pull here, but the characters and Cassandra is a character you will long remember.

The Flight Attendant is a really good read.

I would categorize The Flight Attendant as a suspense thriller. The writing technique that took me out of the flow of the book was the heavy use of inner dialogues for the main characters. I chose this book because of the premise, and for the most part Chris Bohjalian kept that promise (though I found the ending unsatisfactory, personal opinion). The main character is an alcoholic, most times functional, sometimes apologetic, but a drunk none the less. I wanted to see more growth from the character, I wanted to eventually support her if not like her. At the point in her life where we join her, the lessons just arent being learned, and that was depressing, disheartening reading for me. The story lagged in the middle to me and seemed rushed in the final pages, so I would term it unbalanced. The suspense factor was good but not intense.
The Flight Attendant reminded me of the reasons I dislike The Girl on the Train, so perhaps the drunk unreliable narrator isnt for me.

This was a very slow read : I had to make myself pick it up. I found the depiction of the main character to be bothersome: a male engaging in the same type of behavior would not have garnered the kind of negative attention and shaming that Cassie did. Then again, I was extremely frustrated with Cassie's self-defeating behavior, always making the worst decision, never considering consequences, digging herself a deeper and deeper hole at every turn. On top of that, I never connected with her, so I couldn't muster any real empathy (unusual for me). Ultimately, I didn't care what happened to her. I finished mostly because I wanted to know what really happened.
This is my first book by this author, but I've heard a lot of good things about him. Honestly, I expected more. It felt like half the book was repeating everything that was wrong with Cassie and her choices (ad nauseam), leaving very little room for the meaty plot I expected.

Cassie is an binge-drinking flight attendant prone to blackouts and one-night stands, so when she wakes up in a Dubai hotel room that isn’t hers, in bed with a passenger she was flirting with on an international flight, it’s just another day in her transcontinental, party-girl life. But while trying to quietly get out of bed without waking him, she finds she is covered in blood…but it’s not hers.

The man next to her is dead, his throat slit.

With little memory of the night before, she’s fuzzy about what happened—and isn’t entirely certain she didn’t kill him—but rather than alert the authorities, she quickly returns to her hotel and the rest of the crew for their flight out to their next destination. When Cassie eventually returns home to New York, she is interviewed by investigators, and continues to make one bad decision after another, all the while, trying to piece together spotty memories of what happened that night. She remembers a woman stopping by the hotel room to discuss business with her colleague about a meeting that was to take place the following day, and the three of them had drinks together, but doesn’t remember any behavior that would’ve resulted in murder.

This was a gripping, page-turning thriller, right up until the too-pat ending that didn’t fit at all with the rest of the book, but it’s still a worthy read, and I’ll definitely be looking into some of Bohjalian’s other novels. 3.5 stars

NetGalley and Doubleday Books kindly provided me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Flight attendant, Cassandra Bowden awakens after a night where she blacked out in Dubai to find the man she spent the night with is dead. She flees the hotel room and returns to her hotel to get on a flight to Paris. Cassie does not remember what happened the prior evening and is not 100% sure she didn't kill the man. She is pretty sure she didn't as she does stupid things when she drinks, but has never done dangerous things previously.

A murder investigation is in the forefront and Cassie is doing everything she can to cover her tracks. Being questioned by the FBI, Cassie finally admits she knows the murdered man and had a one night stand with him.

In Bohjalian's normal vain, nothing is what it seems and the twists keep coming right until the very end.

I was given a digital copy of this from Netgalley for review. I enjoyed this one. It kept me interested and was a pretty quick read. Well written, and contains both a compelling plot and an interesting protagonist. I like books that can deliver both.