by Julie Clark

“If I left him, I’d have to do it in a way where he could never find me. Look what happened to Maggie Moretti.”

This was cleverly plotted and tightly constructed. Two beleaguered women from opposite ends of the social spectrum encounter each other at an airport. They are strangers but both are trying to escape life threatening situations. They exchange identities and flights in order to throw off their powerful pursuers. One gets on the plane back to the other’s home town, while her co-conspirator takes her place on a political relief mission to Puerto Rico. It was an off the cuff arrangement born of desperation, but if all works as planned, both will appear to vanish into thin air and be able to start normal new lives. But then one of the planes crashes with no survivors.

Both women and their stories share the focus in this novel. We go back and forth between the two. We trace Claire, who is the abused wife of a powerful political scion, from how she got to be in the desperate position she finds herself, to her meticulously planned escape which blows up in her face at the last minute, to her grasp at the last straw solution that Eva offers at the airport. Then we follow her to Eva’s home in Berkeley, California where she poses as a friend of the vacationing Eva. She tries to remain hidden from the long reach of her powerful husband who is starting to suspect that something fishy is going on and runs into those that are pursuing Eva. It soon becomes clear that Eva did not tell her the truth about why she wanted to change places. The focus of Eva’s story is her past life and how she got into the dangerous situation she finds herself in. As we become invested in Eva’s story up to the day of the crash, we learn that she may not have gotten on that plane after all, and may still be alive. This hope keeps our interest in Eva at a high pitch even though she is not as sympathetic a character as Claire.

There is more than one good twist as things come to their conclusion, one of which explains a coincidence that was just too far-fetched to be believed. It made the book a lot smarter than I thought it was. I was engaged in both women’s stories almost equally but probably Claire’s a little more as it is her we follow in present day as she tries to solve the mystery of Eva, navigates a new identity in a strange town, keeps tabs on her husband, and also must deal with the dangers and secrets in Eva’s life as well. There was just the right amount of tension and suspense for me which means occasional relief from unremitting anxiety. The ending was a bit bittersweet, which I usually don’t like, but it seemed right and was accomplished admirably. The sweet part of the ending thoroughly made up for the aspects that didn’t end up quite the way I wanted.