Reviewed by Ephantus Gold
In “The 10:12” by Anna Maloney. A woman named Claire gets on a train from Manchester to London. She boards it as a supportive sister-in-law and as a wife whose marriage is falling apart, only to step off as something else entirely. She steps into chaos but refuses to let go even when professionals and the police tell her to stop. One senses that at her age- fifty-eight- she is fresh out of patience for people telling her what to and what not to do. It’s this assumption the reader, however nearly, regrets, when they are caught red-handed underestimating her ordinariness. Purchase Here.
Claire is on her way to London when a drunk man forces her to switch seats. She does it anyway to escape his whisky fumes. But instead of thanking her, he calls her “woman.” Claire chooses to swallow that and allow the moment to pass, because she can’t afford to pick a battle with a man who’s drunk at 10 in the morning, especially in an enclosed space. Lost in thoughts of her crumbling marriage, she emerges from the toilet and walks straight into a hijacking. Her marriage worries go quiet as survival takes over. What she doesn’t know is that she’s about to cross a line she can never uncross. That “crossing” is the pivot the whole book hangs on, pulling along with it the reader who witnesses her “transformation,” including those who scream at her not to go there.
The reader will appreciate how Maloney finds comedy in the cracks of catastrophe. Her protagonist somehow manages to smell the detergent on a hijacker’s clothes. She also mutters an apology to a corpse. This isn’t supposed to be funny, but it is. In a thriller, you would expect a hardened ex-soldier, not an art lecturer who, in addition to the aforementioned acts, steals nail polish remover from a stranger’s manicure set. It’s this trait that precisely makes her someone you can’t look away from, because you want to know what she will do next.
Maloney, unlike many thrillers where the villains are competent masterminds with coherent ideologies, gives us villains who can’t even agree on what to be angry about. They feel more like a bunch of men who met on a website for people with shared grievances. They are scary because they are ill-advised. The reader knows that such people with guns and grudges are the most dangerous kind. It takes real skill to draw such antagonists who keep the reader on edge throughout without ever being conventionally brilliant.
“The 10:12” by Anna Maloney is a book for readers who enjoy stories that aren’t about outsmarting a brilliant enemy, but surviving a chaotic one. Fans of mixed-media narratives will get a kick out of the court transcripts, text messages, editor notes, and the social media posts stitched through the story.