The Business Trip by Jessie Garcia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
The Business Trip is a novel told in Parts. In Part I, we meet our two main women, Jasmine and Stephanie. It’s a tame start, considering the craziness that follows!
Jasmine and Stephanie are quite different and don’t know each other. That is until they end up in the same row on a flight. Stephanie is headed to a business conference and Jasmine is secretly-fleeing an abusive relationship.
After that fateful flight, their lives will be intricately entangled. Days later both women have vanished and both mentioned the same man, Trent, in text messages to friends and loved ones, shortly before they disappeared.
Who is Trent McCarthy, and how did he end up tied to both of these women?
I found this story to be intriguing from the very start. We’re introduced to a lot of characters, but I felt like the full-cast narration of the audio definitely helped to keep everyone straight. I highly recommend that format.
This is certainly a wild ride, and although I feel like this story sort of fell victim to the ‘one twist too many’ issue, I still feel like it was a really enjoyable experience overall.
It kept me guessing and took some turns that I was not in the least expecting. It’s full of unlikable characters, except for Stephanie and her neighbor/friend, Robert. I loved them.
The two men that are given the most time in this story, Glenn, Jasmine’s abusive partner, and the aforementioned, Trent, are both terrible, but in such a way that they almost feel like caricatures of what a bad guy is. That did irk me a little. It felt a touch lazy, TBH.
Even with that being said though, I still feel like the twists and turns were exciting enough to make this one worth rounding up my 3.5-star rating.
Garcia did a great job with the structure of this. I loved how all the Parts played off one another seamlessly to build out the full picture of what was actually going on here. That’s where I felt this story was the most successful.
Thank you to the publisher, Macmillan Audio, for providing me with a copy to read and review. The audio production was fantastic and lends itself well to the format of this story.
This is the first time I’ve read from Jessie Garcia, but I would absolutely be interested in reading more. This was fun!