Seeming to call upon familiar tropes from Golden Age mysteries, Eva Jurczyk sets her thriller 6:40 to Montreal in a disabled train en route to Montreal in the middle of a blizzard with a main character named Agatha who is a thriller writer herself, but the similarities end there.
It's the week between Christmas and New Years, and Agatha, fresh off the success of her debut best seller has been hit with writer's block, so her husband has gifted her with a round-trip, first-class ticket for the train from their home in Toronto to Montreal so that she can have 12 uninterrupted hours to do nothing except focus on her writing. But Agatha has an ulterior motive for the journey, as as she surveys the small group of travelers in the first-class car, she worries that they all have potentially bad intentions as well.
Soon after they leave the outskirts of Toronto, the train breaks down, one of the passengers ends up dead, and Agatha worries that she was the intended victim. Now that she's worried that someone else in the car is out to get her, she focuses on staying alive more than trying to figure out what happened.
Jurczyk successfully packs twists into a setting that wouldn't seem to have room for them by layering some life or death situations which are heart-wrenching as well as realistic. I gave this 3.5 stars and would recommend as a good winter read.
ARC was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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