NetGalley ARC | The Business Trip

I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: negative infinity stars

Absolute dumbest, most illogical fucking book I have ever read. In fact, it is number one on my list of super shitty books I wasted time on in 2024. You can find that whole list HERE.

Stephanie and Jasmine are two women who don't know each other but board the same flight for different reasons. Stephanie is on a work trip and Jasmine is escaping from her abusive douchebag boyfriend. Pretty soon crazy texts are flying everywhere to all these other pointless characters, then nothing. Complete radio silence. But both women mentioned a man named Trent McCarthy to those pointless other characters and he becomes the focus in their disappearances.

On the surface, this book seems like something I LOVE. But it was all a trick because this book was SO, SO, SO bad. Like, truly a contender for one of the worst books I've ever read.

Here is my initial reaction on Goodreads, followed by an edit when someone commented about the checking-in-to-the-hotel thing. I was so mad, I didn't even care about capitalization, punctuation, or grammar:

"Absolute dumbest fucking book I've ever read in my life. Completely would never happen in a million years because everything just manages to work out so perfectly for jasmine. the whole way through. ***So she just is able to check in to the same hotel toom that 'Stephanie' has already checked into? That's not how check-ins work and it would show in the system that Stephanie had already checked in.*** And jasmine's not even an unreliable narrator, because everything is just so stupid. A million useless points of view, all telling and no showing. Absolutely awful writing, sounded like high schoolers talking instead of adult 40 yr old women. Easily one of the worst books of 2024. From about 40% in I was hate-reading, just to see how stupid it would get. Spoiler: it got reeeeeeal stupid, illogical, predictable, and more stupid.

***EDIT: Apprently she just used Stephanie's ID to get into the room. At that point I was already skimming because it was so bad. But, gien how terrible the rest of the book was, it made sense from my skimming that the author would do something so stupid. God, this book was awful."

Ugh. So, so bad.

As for the hotel check-in thing, I honestly can't remember the scene exactly. But Jasmine swiped Stephanie's credit card and ID on the plane. So even if I misremembered, how was Stephanie able to check into her hotel? How did she not notice those things were missing?

Jasmine is AWFUL. We are supposed to feel sorry for her because she is supposedly stuck in this abusive relationship with her dumbass boyfriend, Glenn. There is no single reason to root for her, because she can apparently murder people withouta second thought, but couldn't manage to come up with a way to just kill Glenn and make it look like an accident? She could have done that in the year it took her to save up money to escape. All the framing and murdering was way more work, and he was the only person in the book who might have actually deserved to be killed. This book would've been a lot shorter, maybe even never unleashed on the public.

Along the way we find out she killed a girl in high school and framed the boyfriend. Being rich as a reason to be murdered will come up more than once in this stupid book.

She frames Trent in the present. AND murders Stehanie to steal her identity and justifies it by basically saying that Stephanie has a lot of money and has probably lived a decent life. But THEN also has the nerve to call herself a champion of women? What in the actual fuck?

I think another reason I am so mad about this stupid book is that it started out strong. I was engaged in the story, until all the different POVs started popping up. So many were unnecessary. And then Jasmine retells the same thing, from her POV. Essentially you read the same thing twice, but the second time Jasmine explains why it's okay for her to murder people who she thinks have it coming because they had the audacity to be rich.

Trent, the guy Jasmine choses to take the fall for her, was also seriously awful, in a different way. It felt like his disgusting behaviors were exaggerated so greatly, so that no one would feel bad when he was accused. He was seriously a charicature of the worst type of narcissistic frat-boy mentality type of guy.

The so-called plot twists are not actually plot twists, because they make absolutely no sense whatsoever. There have to be clues, for it to truly be a good twist. But here it was just Jasmine jumping from one perfect set-up to another and everything working out magically for her almost the entire time.

In the end, there is not even any good, logical reason for Jasmine to steal Stephanie's identity. She escaped the moment she was on that flight. She could have stayed in Denver and started over. Do we really believe Glenn was going to come looking for her? And how would he even be able to do that? Again, a much shorter book, or the possibility of it not existing at all.

And yet, here we are.

Awful. Do not recommend.