When Kaitlin Li’s twin brother, Conor, disappears after Atlantic Airlines Flight 702 vanishes while flying across the Atlantic, with all passengers and crew presumed dead, she becomes obsessed with solving the mystery. She sets up a Facebook page for tips and is soon investigating. Inevitably this leads to a whole heap of conspiracies and various people who might be kooks, spies, or various shades of baduns.
The tragic, and downright weird, tale of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared without a trace over the Pacific in 2014, clearly inspired Passenger List. MH370 has inspired many conspiracy theories and these are clearly also an inspiration for Passenger List. In real life I have no time for conspiracy theories, but in fiction I love a conspiracy thriller. For example, personally I suspect Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of JFK, but I love a JFK conspiracy novel or film and Oliver Stone’s movie might be hokum but was great fun.
That said, as I read Passenger List I wondered whether this was going to be just a rehash of MH370 conspiracies, all pushed along by cardboard cutout genre fiction tropes and two-dimensional characters. This is a novel inspired by a podcast (a drama podcast, obviously. Not a true crime one). It feels cardboard cutout and there is little depth to the characters. That said, the plot moves along at pace and when the final denouement occurs it is believable, even for someone like me who doubts conspiracy theories in real life. The author doesn’t go with the most outlandish theory, but ends with something much more realistic, knowing as we do how governments have a tendency to cover their backs.
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