#BlogTour-‘What She Saw Last Night’ by M.J Cross (Mason Cross)

About the book..

Jenny Bowen is going home. Boarding the Caledonian Sleeper, all she wants to do is forget about her upcoming divorce and relax on the ten-hour journey through the night.

In her search for her cabin, Jenny helps a panicked woman with a young girl she assumes to be her daughter. Then she finds her compartment and falls straight to sleep.

Waking in the night, Jenny discovers the woman dead in her cabin … but there’s no sign of the little girl. The train company have no record of a child being booked on the train, and CCTV shows the dead woman boarding alone.

The police don’t believe Jenny, and soon she tries to put the incident out of her head and tells herself that everyone else is right: she must have imagined the little girl.

But deep down, she knows that isn’t the truth

‘What She Saw Last Night’ by M.J Cross is published in paperback by Orion in paperback, audiobook and ebook formats.

My thanks to the team at Orion and Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for the blogtour invite and my gifted paperback review copy.

With echoes of ‘4:50 from Paddington’ and an an intergral mystery launched in the very first chapter, you feel as if you are walking alongside narrator Jenny as she is dragged into a compelling, and unstoppable tale of a missing child that no one saw but her.

How reliable Jenny is as a narrator will be up to the individual reader to discern. but right from page one I was with her, from her last minute rush onto the train, to the finding of the body culminating in  investigating a crime which everyone believes was suicide, I was urging her on,to find out the truth.

The plot is as claustrophobic and air tight as the tiny ‘room’ (read cupboard!)aboard the Caledonian sleeper that Jenny is travelling on and the plot is as taut as the tightrope Jenny balances on as she assesses her own sanity and the truth of what she saw with her own eyes. As an IT tech,with the evidence of the CCTV laid before her, combined with expert testimony from witnesses who deny ever seeing a child on the train, have her questioning her sanity,is there a chance that recent events in Jenny’s life have conspired to overtake her? And how will trying to find a girl who may, or may not exist, have the potential to endanger her very life?

The sense of panic and disbelief is palpable and I honestly whizzed through this thriller completely on the edge of my seat-this poor book has been dragged everywhere with me as I couldn’t put it down and the biggest mystery which I had on finishing was ‘why the hell have I not been reading this author before now?’

What it means is there is a backlist of books to work through(happy me!)

I would urge lovers of thrillers and classic mysteries to check out ‘What She Saw Last Night’,in this humble blogger’s opinion, you will not be disappointed!

About the author…

Mason Cross was born in Glasgow in 1979. He studied English at the University of Stirling and has worked variously as a tax officer, events coordinator, project manager and pizza delivery boy. He has written a number of short stories which have been published in Ellery Queen, Scribble and First Edition.

His story ‘A Living’, was shortlisted for the Quick Reads ‘Get Britain Reading’ Award. His first novel, ‘The Killing Season’ was longlisted for the 2015 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, and his second, ‘The Samaritan’ was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club in Spring 2016. The third book in the series, ‘The Time To Kill’ was released in 2016 and published in the US under the title ‘Winterlong’ in 2017, followed by ‘Don’t Look For Me’ and ‘Presumed Dead’. He lives near Glasgow with his wife and three children

Links-http://www.masoncross.net/

https://www.compulsivereaders.com/

Twitter @masoncrossbooks

@orionbooks

@Tr4cyF3nt0n