Unfortunately this was a DNF for me. I pushed through to the 25% mark but it didn’t feel like the plot was going anywhere. I got a bit lost with the backwards and forwards into the book the main character was writing or had written. I’m still confused to be honest.
If a mystery set on a train is your thing. This might be the book for you.

Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the advanced reader copy! All thoughts are my own:

Author Agatha embarks on a 6:40AM train ride to Montreal for a writers retreat, but soon the train breaks down and comes to a halt during a snowstorm and one passenger turns up dead and its a forced proximity game of survival in this locked train car.

I don’t know, the premise seemed really good, but the execution was lacking for me. I feel like a lot happened, but also not much happened. I’m not sure how to explain it fully, but it just wasn’t that fun of a read for me. Also the ending felt pretty abrupt as well.

Overall I can see people liking this book, but it wasn’t for me.

A wonderfully scary and mysterious read. Eva has done another locked (train) door mystery to perfection. The minute by minute chapters left me wanting to continue and left many cliff hangers. There is no emotion lost in this quick hitter. The depth created with the characters was remarkable. A must read!

I received an ARC of this book from Poisoned Pen Press via NetGalley in exchange for my honest feedback. I don't tend to like books that I find hard to believe, and this was very hard to believe in many aspects, such as:

1. The conflict around what Agatha wrote in her book (who would ever do this?)
2. Actions of various passengers
3. The ridiculous reveal
4. A train stopped for hours in this day and age with no way to contact anyone/ no way to get out

The book is unnecessarily long with a lot of filler/ the same things happening. However, I did want to find out the outcome, so I wasn't tempted to DNF. Most of the twists/ reveals were a letdown and I found myself thinking, "Really? That's why this happened/ this character acted as they did?"

Probably the most realistic aspect was the behavior of the two mothers in the book. One who was utterly dedicated to doing anything to help her son, and the other who has a child the same age as mine, so I found that portion very on point.

This was a bit chaotic. A writer taking a train as a writing retreat. But while trying to do so everything goes wrong: a boy needs insulin, the train get stuck, a former friend is mad at you for writing a book ‘about her’ oh and someone is murder. I loved the messiness this brought. Since we were in a train I really enjoyed that each chapter heading was the time. I felt at times this was a little bit slow, but overall an enjoyable read.

Seems like there are a lot of mysteries coming out right now that involve a train...and so far, none of them have worked for me. This one was slow to start and didn't seem to improve from there.

I liked the premise of this book but it didn’t hit the mark for me. The ending wasn’t what I thought it would be. Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for this copy for read and review

All aboard for a thrilling ride! This zany twist on the classic locked-room mystery takes place on a train marooned in the middle of nowhere. With first-class passengers stranded and a mysterious figure lurking about, it's a wild adventure full of unexpected turns and delightful suspense!

Agatha needs to get some work done on her new book. Her husband buys her a train ticket for a six-hour ride from Toronto to Montreal so she can have some quiet time. It appears to be a perfect writing retreat.

Agatha has her own plans for the day though. Then the train breaks down in the middle of the frigid Canadian woods, and one of Agatha's fellow passengers dies quietly in his seat, a victim of murder. Is anyone safe on the stranded train?

I didn't enjoy this book at all. The main character is off putting from the beginning. The writing didn't engage me as it was overly detailed and caused a slow pace. I do think other readers will enjoy the writing style though as it is reminiscent of classic mysteries.

The setting on the train is fun and the snowy setting once the train breaks down could have been great but was a letdown.

I disliked Agatha even more when her secret was revealed. I think my distaste for her colored everything else. Then the ending was too far out there. It's also my personal taste that I do not like stories like that.

There’s a certain kind of dread that doesn’t come screaming. It seeps in. It builds like frost along a train window, quiet, creeping, and suddenly all-consuming. Eva Jurczyk’s 6:40 to Montreal does not sprint. It prowls.

At the center of the novel is Agatha, an editor, a mother, a wife, a woman diagnosed with cancer who doesn’t scream or weep or shatter. She boards the train not in a desperate act of self-discovery, but with the dull determination of someone trying to outpace her own numbness. Her husband calls it a writing retreat. She’s too tired to argue.

Agatha is not a “feelings girlie.” She’s rational. Controlled. Or at least, she wants to be. What makes her so mesmerizing is not her reliability but her internal absurdity, those pitch-black, wildly inappropriate thoughts that make you laugh in the wrong places. “She said the wrong thing,” you think. Then you realize, she didn’t say it. She just thought it. And you’ve thought worse.

Her voice is the novel’s beating heart and fractured lens. When Finch, her unwanted companion on this so-called retreat, turns up dead on the snow-stalled train, Agatha’s mind does what it does best. It ventures into the dark and curious corners. She watches as snow distorts the body outside the window:

“It gave the illusion of distorting his figure and twisted his mouth into a desperate, panicked scream. I reared back from the window and did the thing I’d been trying to avoid; I looked at Finch’s full body. The scream had been my imagination. He wasn’t begging for help. He was just dead.”

Finch is the first. He won’t be the last.

What unfolds is a murder mystery with all the tight suspense of an Agatha Christie tale, except the whodunit isn’t the most interesting question. It’s the why not me? that rattles beneath each chapter. There’s Vivian and her son, traveling home from his first semester at college. Jeff, who could have been a hero in another novel. Cyanne, Agatha’s seething nemesis. The kind train attendant, whose smile feels less warm as the heat shuts off and tempers rise.

The tension isn’t just external, with the blizzard, isolation, and death. It’s in the quiet cracks of Agatha’s domestic life, the ache of a marriage gone sterile, the absence of her child’s voice on the phone, the sense that whatever “retreat” she was promised was never truly about writing.

Jurczyk is precise in her atmosphere. The train is a closed system, a pressure cooker, and once the first body slumps over lifeless, the rest of the ride becomes a study in human restraint, or the lack of it.

There’s beauty in the restraint of the prose too. Jurczyk doesn’t overwrite. She lingers. She lets you sit uncomfortably with Agatha’s imagination, with your own. You don’t just witness the deaths. You witness the unraveling of the silence around them.

If the novel has a fault, it’s that the ending arrives too fast. Plot-wise, it resolves what it must, but the final moments don’t quite match the rich, deliberate pacing that defines the rest of the story. Jurczyk proves herself a master of atmosphere and timing, which makes the abruptness of the close all the more noticeable. A few more pages, a breath or two more for Agatha and the reader to absorb what just happened, would have elevated the finish from sufficient to unforgettable.

6:40 to Montreal is not about survival in the traditional sense. It’s about what remains when we stop trying to survive the way we’re expected to. When control fails. When imagination becomes monstrous. When apathy starts to look an awful lot like freedom.

You may step off the train, but parts of this book will not step out of you.

Thank you Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for the ARC!!

What I liked about this train ride thriller was the double take moments of writing that were sprinkled throughout the novel. I don't want to say too much without giving anything away, but there were certain chapters that ended with a raw stream of thought from the MC that definitely made me want to keep going. I also enjoyed how this was in written in the modern day which added an extra layer of depth to your typical murder mystery train novel.

I'm torn on how to rate this one. On
the one hand, I found many of the characters to be insufferable or tolerable at best, including the MC. On the other, the author included notes at the end for why the MC was written the way she was which provided necessary context. While this wasn't exactly my cup of tea, I could see why others would enjoy it.

3.5 stars

This was a great premise but not for me. It was just unsatisfying in it's conclusion and felt a little long. I really wanted to love it but it just fell short.

A very Agatha Christie (by design) closed door novel set on a train bound for Montreal. When the train is stopped because of an unexpected snowstorm, passengers start dropping like flies. Ultimately I found this one pretty predictable and plodding, although it had entertaining moments and a really colorful cast of characters.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for the ARC.

Agatha, a successful author of whodunits (no, not THAT Agatha), is sneaking out of her home early in the morning to take a train. Is this a domestic abuse situation? She’s planning something that she’s hiding but what? She finally makes it to the train, texting back and forth with her bestie, whom she’s meeting at the end of her short train ride. Enter the cast, only a few characters, all distinctive. Then, in the tradition of her namesake’s most famous novel, the train is stuck between stations. The doors are shut down automatically and this group is stranded. An unlikable businessman, an overbearing mom with her almost grownup son, a big guy of unclear occupation and super-efficient Dorcas, the attendant. But there is one more person, Agatha’s once friend now enemy, who swears that Agatha stole her life for her first book. Most of the characters were easy to like, but even the nicest person can snap when stuck and isolated by a blizzard. Then, there’s a dead body and a medical emergency, and tempers flare. The protagonist did not endear herself to me, although little by little we learn more about why she is the way she is. The good parts and the horrible ones. Same with the rest of the characters. I really had no idea what was happening, whodunit or why? I wasn’t even sure who the intended victim was. Unlike the train, the pace never slows down, just keeps gaining speed until the shocking reveal. I know that adjective is used all the time and, reading as many mysteries as I do, hardly anything shocks me anymore. This one did. I’m not completely positive that I understood the ending, but I was satisfied. Five big stars.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Poisoned Pen Press.

Here is the link to my Goodreads review!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7688969502

Unfortunately, as an avid thriller reader, this book was underwhelming to me. I wasn’t left feeling like the book had concluded at the end and the plot twist was predictable.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this ARC. I’m very grateful to have been chosen.

Agatha became an overnight sensation with the publication of her first book. Since then, she's struggled to write and when the terminal cancer diagnosis comes she plunges into despair. She'll do anything to reclaim her loving marriage, her tender motherly feelings for her son and her ability to just function without feeling CANCER hanging over her head. She's tried alcohol but needs something else, perhaps an affair? When her husband surprises her with a train ticket so that she can have a day of writing on the train (as he's heard of other writers that also take the trip) she's excited, knowing that she'll probably not write a thing, but she plans to meet an old college flame for sex in a hotel at their destination.
When a snowstorm brings the train to a halt in the middle of nowhere, Agatha finds herself locked into a train car with six other passengers and not all of them will make it off the train alive. Is someone targeting certain passengers or are the deaths random? Exactly who are these people anyway and why is there one certain passenger on the train that Agatha has tried to avoid for years? Was she set up? Was she the target?
Keeping the cast of characters small allows readers to get to know each one's background and why they are on the train. As the hours and the snow continue to pile up, so does the tension in the rail car. Suspicions are raised, motives proposed and no one knows who they can trust. The train may not be moving, but readers will certainly want to keep moving through the pages!

⭐️⭐️⭐️½ – Twisty, Unpredictable, and Occasionally Unbelievable

6:40 to Montreal by Eva Jurczyk is a tightly wound psychological thriller set almost entirely on a train, where the tension builds with each mile. The story follows a group of passengers—strangers (or are they?)—on a seemingly routine journey that quickly unravels into something far more sinister. Secrets emerge, motives are questioned, and no one is quite who they seem to be.

The novel is packed with twists and turns, making it genuinely difficult to pin down who did what and why. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, Jurczyk pulls the rug out from under you again. This kept the reading experience engaging and unpredictable, even if it occasionally felt like too many layers were being added at once.

One challenge I had was connecting with the main character, who felt untrustworthy from the very beginning. While this is likely intentional, it made it difficult to get a clear sense of her motives and made following the story more disorienting than suspenseful at times. Some of the characters’ decisions and actions also stretched believability, which pulled me out of the story more than once.

This isn’t my favorite genre, so it was a little hard to rate. That said, 6:40 to Montreal succeeds in creating a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere and delivers on the mystery, even if the character logic occasionally falters. Fans of psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators and tangled motives will likely enjoy the ride.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was my first book by this author and I really enjoyed it! It’s a locked door murder mystery and I loved reading it! The pacing was perfect and I didn’t guess the killer which was fun! I loved all the different characters, but the ending left me wanting more. Overall I really enjoyed reading this and would recommend it!

No, I’m sorry, I didn’t enjoy this one. The premise sounded great - a cool Canadian thriller that takes place on a train. The execution just wasn’t there, though. The build up to the ending was just too rushed for a story that seemed so dragged out!

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!

I had high hopes for this book based on the description but it didn’t quite live up to expectations unfortunately. The pacing wasn’t quite right. It was readable but flawed.