The Passenger

Lisa Lutz
Jun 23, 2016

After Tanya Dubois finds her husband's dead body at the bottom of the stairs she decides to run. Not because she's guilty, but because she is living under an assumed name and hiding from the past. She needs a new identity and the only way to get one is to call the man she's hated for 15 years. Roland Oliver has connections and money, two things Tanya needs. His reason for helping her? He has secrets of his own. "I want a clean identity, a name that's prettier than my own and if possible, I'd like to be a few years younger." Thus, Amelie Keen is born. 

Through a succession of events, Lutz takes us on a ride that has "Amelie" running into a steely-eyed bartender named Blue. Blue sees right through her disguise and proposes a sort of alliance, although Tanya gets the feeling she may be getting more than she bargained for. She also encounters a very easy on the eyes kind of guy named Domenic. Domenic knows everything is not quite on the up and up about "Amelie", but his only request? "Please tell me you've never killed anyone." 

The first person narration makes The Passenger an irresistible read. I enjoyed Blue, who Tanya meets early on, who is obviously a woman with her own secrets, and who turns up later in the novel to play an important role. Each new identity, hint and clue about Tanya’s past kept me reading. We slowly learn that the death of her husband is only a minor detail of her life and that so much more has happened to this woman than we realize. A very satisfying read.

Reviewed by Library Staff