You might remember me saying a lot of nice things last year about Sarah Lotz’s first book  The Three and Day Four, while strictly not a sequel, is set in the same world… sort of.

Unlike the last one though this is written through the eyes and experiences of a group of characters aboard a singles cruise in the Gulf Of Mexico on an ageing ship belonging to a cruise line with a questionable history. She brings us a cast including a dodgy medium milking her followers, her personal assistant at the end of her tether, a blogger trying to debunk the lot, a steward and many more in the centre of an eerie crisis.

The ship stops dead in the ocean on the 4th day of the cruise and it becomes quickly apparent that normal mechanical failure is not the cause when time marches on, conditions deteriorate, there’s no contact with the outside world and no help arrives…

As I said last time, Sarah Lotz writes multiple characters very convincingly and cinematically and this one rattles along with increasing stomach-churningness (from violence, backed up toilets, vomiting bugs and just the grinding sense of unease that gets worse and worse as the novel goes on).

I’ll be honest in that I did have a moment on the last 100 pages thinking “is that it?” but then, through a very nice pivot, she turns everything at an angle and stuff starts to make a much bigger sense, particularly in the context of The Three (and presumably whatever comes next). I do wonder what people who haven’t read the first one will make of this even though it’s strictly not a sequel. Next book please.

As for taking a cruise, ever, Day Four has pretty much ensured that’s never going to happen…