Carole Tyrrell worked in the theatre for nearly 10 years and was always fascinating by the way death and the supernatural formed many of the greatest and most enduring works. She has read crime fiction for many years and enjoys the broad range of the genre.
It’s amusing how quickly holiday friendships can develop: strangers thrown together who seek company for the trip. However, sometimes the people you befriend want to be more than just a holiday memory.
Carrie and Violet meet for the first time in Beijing. They’re both travelling alone but not from choice. Carrie’s best friend, Laura, had to drop out due to injury and Violet has broken up with her boyfriend, Sam. They get chatting and on impulse, Carrie offers Violet the unused train ticket for the Trans-Siberian Express. She knows nothing about Violet and has no idea that it’s not even her real name.
But, as they share a cabin on the long train journey, Carrie begins to suspect that her new companion isn’t what she pretends to be. In fact, Violet’s playing a different game of neediness and desire and will add to the body count that she’s already left in her wake. But as they stop off in remote places such as Mongolia, Ulaanbaater and Irkursk Carrie begins to feel very uneasy about her new companion. A shaman’s warning about Violet having something wrong with her scares her and she senses that she wants to take their relationship much further.
Violet’s tale is told in the first person and she expresses her desire to completely take over Carrie. But if someone rejects her then she takes the ultimate revenge. The balance of power between them quickly shifts as Carrie pays for everything while beginning to notice that Violet is wearing her clothes. She suspects that Violet may also be using her laptop. But Violet is rootless, a wanderer who no-one actually wants as even her parents pay her to keep away from them. She is always someone else with changing hairstyles and other peoples bank cards in her wallet which made her hard to visualize at times.
The narrative is interspersed with Carrie’s emails home to her family and Laura in which she confides her misgivings about Violet with her travellers’ tales. I enjoyed the good detail in the descriptions of their journey and stop-offs. Horse riding in the Gobi Desert, a shaman’s festival in Mongolia and local cuisine but there wasn’t so much that it felt like a travelogue. There was also the homogenization of tourist destinations with the Irish bar in Mongolia. The growing power struggle was also well portrayed as it leads to a climactic scene in Berlin. And you start to wonder who’s playing whom?
Violet is a solid well-written thriller and is the sixth novel from SJI Holliday. It’s also a dark tale of obsession and passion and after reading it you may be more careful about any new friends that you make while on holiday.
