business or pleasure . . . or murder?
Jasmine has had enough. When she first met Glenn, he seemed nice. He took her on dates and made her feel special. But that was long ago. That was before he hit her and demanded she turn over her paychecks and kept her away from friends and family. And then he started hitting her. Jasmine saved up a little bit of money week after week for over a year in order to make her getaway. But it’s finally time. She is boarding a plane for Colorado and not looking back.
Stephanie is a news director in Madison, Wisconsin, heading for a work conference in San Diego, with a stop in Denver. She didn’t know anyone at the conference, and she was getting tired of being the person from the station who had to travel to all the work things. But as a divorced woman with a cat, Stephanie is the easy person to choose, and she always agrees. Her neighbor and friend Robert will be handling the cat sitting duties, and she will bring him back a kitschy gift. It’s what they do when she has to go on these trips.
These women had nothing in common but a flight, a row of seats where one sat by the window and the other by the aisle. They chatted briefly and went on their separate ways. But aside from a few texts where each woman talked about a new man they were seeing, no one heard from either woman until the police were called to the home of a man named Trent McCarthy and find DNA from both women in his possession.
Trent is a news director also, and he attended the same news conference Stephanie was heading to. They had been assigned the same table for the first day, sharing ideas on running their respective newsrooms. After the conference, he had gone back to Atlanta to return to his life, and everything seemed normal until the day the police came knocking on his door, after a 911 call directed them to his place, a woman begging for help on the line.
As the police and Stephanie’s fellow news reporters started to dig into her disappearance, they found a number of things that didn’t add up. Her texts had been sparse and terse. Stephanie hadn’t answered her phone for anyone, just sent texts and voice memos and posted on social media. What exactly happened to these women between their flight to Denver and Trent McCarthy’s arrest?
The Business Trip is the debut thriller from Jessie Garcia, and it’s filled with questions and twists that suck you into the story and keep the pages turning until the end. Told in multiple perspectives, this story offers up breadcrumbs of truth, letting readers make their own guesses about what is really happening and finally resolving it (for the record, I guessed wrong). But seeing all the puzzle pieces fall into place is such a fun journey that I genuinely enjoyed this trip.
I listened to The Business Trip on audio, which has ten different narrators. It was easy to know whose perspective we were getting, as each character truly had a distinctive voice. The voice actors are Andrew Eiden; Dylan Fitzpatrick; Fred Berman; Gail Shalan; Hillary Huber; Jennifer Pickens; John Pirhalla; Kimberly M. Wetherell; Kirby Heyborne; and Tim Campbell, and they definitely bring all these characters to life through this narration. I thought the audio book was masterfully done, and I think it’s a great way to experience this thriller.
Egalleys for The Business Trip were provided by St. Martin’s Press and an early copy of the audio book was provided by Macmillan Audio, both through NetGalley, with many thanks.
