Book info

• Title Distress Signals
• Author Catherine Ryan Howard
• Year 2016
• Genre Mystery

Did she leave, or was she taken? The day Adam Dunne's girlfriend, Sarah, fails to return from a Barcelona business trip, his perfect life begins to fall apart. Days later, the arrival of her passport and a note that reads 'I'm sorry - S' sets off real alarm bells. He vows to do whatever it takes to find her. Adam is puzzled when he connects Sarah to a cruise ship called the Celebrate - and to a woman, Estelle, who disappeared from the same ship in eerily similar circumstances almost exactly a year before. To get the answers, Adam must confront some difficult truths about his relationship with Sarah. He must do things of which he never thought himself capable. And he must try to outwit a predator who seems to have found the perfect hunting ground...

Thoughts

The premise of this kept me reading, a woman disappears and there are tantalising clues about where she may or may not have gone - with not enough evidence of foul play for the police to get involved. The characters were well drawn and dialogue good, plus there are a couple of other viewpoints sprinkled in early on and we don’t know who they really are or how they fit into the puzzle. So it’s good from that point of view, but I did think the foreshadowing cliffhanger was overused and it seemed to come to a very quick end after so much build up.

Rating: 3 / 5