the flight attendant by chris bohjalian summary

' part of her had to see where this speeding train was going to crash and just how cataclysmic would be the carnage,' Bohjalian writes. There's certainly something fascinating about watching an inveterate self-saboteur struggle to save her own life. She has a perverse streak: When she steals trinkets from hotels, 'She did it because it was, like so much else that made her happy, dangerous and self-destructive and just a little bit sick.' While Bohjalian has often written about well-meaning individuals caught in difficult circumstances, Cassie consistently makes things more difficult for herself. The protagonist is something of a departure, too. It's a definite departure for a writer who more frequently concerns himself with domestic dramas. Besides Dubai, Rome is a major setting, and the CIA, the Russian Federation's FSB and drone warfare all figure at least peripherally in the plot.

Seems Sokolov might have been more than the humdrum money manager he appeared to be.įrom this gripping opening, Bohjalian spins out a tale that is half jet-setting international thriller and half character study. Once Cassie returns to her home base of Manhattan, the FBI comes calling. For another, the hotel's security cameras recorded the flight attendant's flight. It's an understandable reaction, perhaps, but also the first of a series of spectacularly bad decisions she'll make in this story.įor one thing, Cassie and the dead man, Alex Sokolov, paused their tryst to socialize with a third person who could easily identify Cassie. Panicking, Cassie flees the room rather than take her chances with the local police. But this time there's an unexpected complication: The young hedge fund manager beside her is dead, his throat slit. The night before, she hooked up with a first-class passenger and then blacked out - not unusual for this binge drinker in her late thirties. The book opens with Cassie waking up beside a near stranger in a swanky hotel in Dubai. (The same is true for pilots, as the 2012 Denzel Washington movie Flight demonstrated.) And few flight attendants could possibly misbehave with more disastrous consequences than Cassie Bowden, the titular heroine of Vermont author Chris Bohjalian's 20th novel.

For these consummate customer-service professionals, soothing sick, frightened or irritable passengers is part of the job.īecause we expect them to be calm and selfless when we aren't, there's a special frisson in stories about flight attendants who misbehave once they're on the ground and off the clock. When we're hurtling through the air at 35,000 feet, we tend to think of flight attendants as our devoted caretakers. The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian, Doubleday, 368 pages.

The flight attendant by chris bohjalian summary