Girl on a Train by A.J. Waines

Okay, first things first, this novel is NOT to be confused with the mega selling The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, which was made into a film starring Emily Blunt.

This book however was reduced at the Amazon Kindle Store to just 99p and having read the blurb, I thought this mystery was worth a go for the money.

Anna Rothman, a journalist, is travelling by train from Portsmouth to London. A woman sat next to her catches her attention but leaves the train at Micheldever station, only Anna believes something is wrong. A tragedy then happens to this woman and Anna takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding her departure from the train.

I found Girl on a Train to be a POOR read, a mystery that was padded out with lots of unnecessary descriptive text setting out every scene. The extreme detailing of the scenes became tiresome for me to read. I thought the plot was weak with there being only 3 key items to finding out what the Girl on a Train had been involved in. Although these 3 key items involved codes, this does not have the quality of a Dan Brown novel, where there is a lot of deciphering of codes and symbols.

There was however a good range of characters to give plenty of scope to who the bad guy was. But it was stretching motivation to the limits as to why Anna was actually bothered in getting to the bottom of this shallow mystery considering it was unpaid work. Then we had the unlikely coincidences with Anna’s past woven into this tiresome tale. The story trudged on with Anna’s perspective when suddenly I turned the page and whallop! I was now confronted with part two and this was going back in time before the train journey and told the sorry tale from the Girl on the Train’s perspective. This time shift and sudden change of focus annoyed me, big time. To add further annoyance to my reading pleasure, a lot further on and I turned the page and “oh dear”, I had reached part three and I was back to Anna’s perspective. This was really frustrating as not only had it shifted back to the present time but I knew more about what had happened than Anna.

So, all in all, I found Girl on a Train to be a frustrating and annoying read. It was a very easy book to put down but I read it to the end. It was NOT a joy to read but gave me the strong feeling of “I’ve started, so I will finish”. Girl on a Train only gets 2 stars from me but like trains, thankfully there will be another novel shortly to pull into my grasp.

Girl on a Train is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook and was written in 2013.