Time to kill on an epic voyage
AT TILBURY Docks in England, Lily Shepherd boards an ocean liner bound for Australia and sets out on a voyage of discovery that will change her life for ever.
With Europe on the brink of war in July 1939, Lily, a maid with a tragic history, has taken the bold decision to escape a life of drudgery and seek adventure instead.
She is instantly seduced by life on board the liner Orontes.
Inhibitions and class distinctions melt away as Lily finds herself mixing with celebrities and high society for cocktails, black-tie balls and land visits to Gibraltar, the Egyptian pyramids and Ceylon.
But as the voyage continues Lily realises that her glamorous new friends are not quite what they seem.
Rich and hedonistic Max and Eliza Campbell, mysterious, handsome Edward Fletcher and fascist George Price are running away from tragedy and scandal greater than Lily’s own.
By the time the ship docks in Sydney five weeks later, two passengers are dead, war has been declared and life will never be the same again for the colourful group thrown together by chance. Rachel Rhys is the pen name of established psychological thriller writer Tammy Cohen who has used the diary of a late friend of her mother as a starting point for her first foray into historical crime fiction.
In her memoirs, Joan Hollies recounted how she took advantage of an assisted passage scheme in the late 1930s that enabled domestic servants to travel to Australia to work.
She recorded the ports they visited, the music played on board and the passengers they picked up on the way, including Jewish victims of persecution in Austria and Germany. As a result A Dangerous Crossing has a wonderful sense of time and place, transporting the reader back to the social and racial tensions in Europe on the eve of the Second World War. Rhys also vividly captures the sights and sounds of the voyage and of every port they stop at. This is not a “whodunnit” and comparisons with Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile in some of the promotional material are misleading. Instead, A Dangerous Crossing is a sumptuous, thrilling and captivating adventure on the high seas where some characters find love and the romances of others are thwarted by dark secrets. The murder mystery element is secondary to the glorious journey that the reader and Lily are swept away on and this reader relished every precious moment on board the Orontes. A simply stunning novel. I did not want it to end.