I seriously need to find some books to enjoy soon. Between this one and "Lair of Dreams" I pretty much despaired through Saturday. "Ghosted" just doesn't work. It doesn't lean in enough to the mystery or romance portions. At times Walsh seems like she was in the middle of writing a romantic suspense book, but pulled it back. Also, the two characters, Sarah and Eddie are bland and have zero chemistry together. I also had some thoughts about Sarah acting like a loon (there is no other word for it) throughout this book over a guy she had sex with for seven days. If she was younger (in her 20s) I could have just went with it, but she's almost 40 and going away weeping and running cause she lost the love of her life. I maybe screeched get a grip at the 50 percent mark.

"Ghosted" starts off with Sarah and Eddie on their last day together. Sarah is worried about seeing Eddie again and vice versa. It's a long road to get there, but it eventually comes out that Sarah lives in California and is only in England visiting family. Eddie, is about to go off on a vacation with friends, so they promise to call each other when he's back in town so they can figure this thing out. My comment was, figure out what? You live an ocean apart, get real. It also dribbles out these two nitwits didn't even talk about their personal lives with each other. Sarah also lies that she's divorced (no separated) and they are both content thinking true love's dream or something.

Fast forward to Sarah not hearing from Eddie and growing increasingly frantic. Two of her best friends are just eh, you had a holiday fling, keep it moving. Sarah though knows that what she and Eddie has was real and proceeds to stalk (yes she does) him through social media, his friend's social media, and even follows one of his friends to a football match hoping Eddie would be there. She's unhinged enough to make me wish that this had ended with Eddie getting a restraining order. I think that what bugs me the most about this, is that if the genders were flipped this would be unacceptable. Point blank, this is unacceptable, I don't care if you are male or female. Getting ghosted sucks, it doesn't give you carte blanche to stalk people. 

To make matters worse, Sarah thinks about going back to Eddie's house to see if he is there, (I can't recall if she does that) but then proceeds to write him letters telling him about her life. I am still trying to see the romance in this book, cause it's not hitting any of my romance receptors at all.

The other characters in this book are given short shrift since we are just following Sarah along as she obsesses and cries over Eddie. Her friends problems are not as important as figuring out the mystery of why Eddie ghosted her. And what gets me, is that it is alluded to and then point blank pointed out how bad things are with some of her friends lives. Jo is with a terrible guy. Her friend Jenni has fertility problems. Sarah has an estranged husband with a new girlfriend that you would think she would be more focused on than Eddie. 

As other reviewers had pointed out, the whole obsession after 7 days makes zero sense. If these two had been dating for months or years it would have worked better. However, Walsh has to set it up as a short time in order for the twists that follow to work. Frankly, if you are just hell-bent on setting up a twist instead of writing a good book, it just makes me liken you to "Girl on a Train" and will cause me to avoid your books in the future. 

The writing was not good. I think another reviewer pointed out that Walsh overly decribes scenery in every scene and she does. I don't care about grass that much. I don't need to hear all of the colors it can be described, along with the smells, etc. The flow was awful. When the book switches POV things really grinded to a halt. After we switch I was ready for the second twist and was glad that I called it correctly. Too bad, if Walsh had shaken things up, that would have saved the book for me. 

The ending was just a meh moment. It doesn't make sense based on what we as readers know. The people going on about this being a great romance made me scratch my head. Sure it's a great romance if we want to pretend that people would have a totally different reaction than what Walsh shows here which is love conquers all. 

What a letdown. Walsh telegraphs most of the twists in this book except for one which was cleverly done. Other than that, she seemed reluctant to push the mystery or romance aspects of the book very hard. Another reviewer said it best, Sarah is ridiculously selflishly absorbed. 

You eventually get all of the pieces to Sarah, but honestly I went eh. The biggest issue I had was that when you find out what’s been going on the romance for me died. It made zero sense for it to be this earth shattering thing after all of the secrets came out.

The other characters had way more problems and issues I wanted to focus on. Jo’s partner who didn’t work and threatened her about custody of her son. Jenni and her husband failing to get pregnant. I was actually kind of disgusted with how Walsh treated Jenni.

I think Walsh made a mistake transitioning to Eddie’s POV half way though. He seriously sounded like a doormat with regards to his mother and he didn’t seem to have a life. I also didn’t get why he loved Sarah. Their chemistry is non-existent. 

Too bad Walsh didn’t lean into the romantic suspense side of things like she could have. She dipped her toe in a few times and let things die.

Good lord I want to tell Sarah to get a grip. She’s all over the place and obsessed with Eddie and why he’s not talking to her. She’s gone to his FB asked people do they know if he’s okay and she now knows he’s fine (she saw him online) and he’s just not responding to her.

Walsh shows us the first day they met and it countdowns to their last day together. I honestly am not getting chemistry between these two. They just seem to be having a lot of sex and not discussing their lives.

Walsh also dangles pieces of Sarah’s life out to us. Sarah misses her sister Hannah, Sarah left England as a teen after something happened and lived permanently in the US after. Sarah is reluctant to stay for long at her parents home. And in between these revelations we have a letter that it sounds like she’s writing to her sister. Sarah is also not divorced, just separated, but still friends with her husband.  That’s another relationship I’m baffled about. 

All in all we’re seeing supposedly a strong businesswoman who runs a huge charity who is losing her grip cause a man isn’t calling her back. Two of her best friends are baffled by her behavior, but they also have some big things happening to them and she’s oblivious to it. Same with her best friend Jenni back home. Everything is about Sarah and why Eddie isn’t calling her back.

I thought that this book would have a lot more mystery than it does.But there’s really not, there’s no mystery going on that I can really see besides Eddie’s a jerk and Sarah is naive.  Maybe we’ll get to something later but it’s not there yet. Also the romance portions of the book are not good.

I’ve been ghosted twice. The first time I couldn’t believe it since I was going out with the guy for three months. We also had mutual friends so they were ticked at him. I haven’t seen him since. The second time was someone I talked to for several months. Technically he ghosted everyone since he said he needed to be focused on himself and he shut down his FB and other social media. We eventually reconnected last Fall and things were tointoka again for a while, but he disappeared again after his birthday in May. I just decided toniteven try to reach out again. People who ghost unless it’s for safety reasons are assholes. 

So far so good. As someone who has been ghosted twice I am real curious how this is going to play out. 

Sarah has met the seemingly perfect Eddie who promises to meet up with her again after she gets back to London. Now that she is back, he is not responding to her texts. We find out that Sarah almost 40 and has recently gone through a divorce. That's all I got so far.

Eh. Definitely not worth the $9.99 I paid for this. A new anthology edited by Stephen King though equals I have to read it though. There were some truly what the hell did I just read reactions to some of the short stories, and a few good grief this is boring. I only really enjoyed four stories out of this collection (gave them five stars), and one of them is a story I am already familiar with. I did give some four stars, but the majority are three stars and below. 

"Cargo" by E. Michael Lewis (3 stars)-An interesting take on those who had to fly back the dead from the Jonestown massacre. It just really didn't do a thing for me though. I just needed it to be scarier or something. I felt like I was missing some key points or something while reading. 

"The Horror of the Heights" by Arthur Conan Doyle (2 stars)-I had to refresh my memory on this one since I didn't even recall it until I started my review. It was just a long form narrative about someone  finding the notebook of a Mr. Joyce-Armstrong who was trying to break the height record of 30,000 feet. People who have tried to beat that record have been found dead. 

"Nightmare at 20,000 feet" by Richard Matheson (5 stars)-This is the original short story that inspired Twilight Zone the show and the movie later on. It was good to read, but honestly many of the readers will be familiar with it so it doesn't feel like new material. 

"The Flying Machine" by Ambrose Bierce (1 stars)- This story wasn't even a page. I initially thought I didn't get a full Kindle version of this book since the story just stops.

"Lucifer" by E.C. Tubb (4 stars)-This was pretty cool. I liked how a time machine (in ring form) comes out to play with an airplane. Don't want to spoil since the ending was so good. I would have loved to see this in a Twilight Zone episode. 

"The Fifth Category" by Tom Bissell (1 star)-This whole thing seems to be a story about how torture is wrong and terribly and seems to be a long winded diatribe against the previous two Administrations. I don't know, it made zero sense to decide to go to such lengths against a man who wrote memos regarding acceptable forms of torture. Especially since these people murdered someone and I don't think you can claim the moral high ground there if you are using someone's life to make some random point. I was so annoyed when I finished this story I set this anthology aside for a few hours. 

"Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds" by Dan Simmons (3 stars)-Everything looked pretty good until the ending. Once again it felt like a story which made no sense to me. Let's murder everyone on the plane to really take out these terrible human beings who you believe are the cause of others death. Why do I keep looking for logic in horror stories?

"Diablitos" by Cory Goodfellow (1 star)-Evil possessed mask plus a plane ride. I was bored. Sorry. I was hoping for something more.

"Air Raid" by John Varley (3 stars)-Interesting, I wish that there had been more detail in this one. It felt like Varley was more focused on the twisty ending than anything else. 

"You are Released" by Joe Hill (5 stars)-Look, I get that King edited this and couldn't make it the first story here, but he should have. Next to Matheson's work this is among the best in this collection. I loved it. Hill seems to be taking real life things (Trump threatening nuclear war against North Korea) and showing what could happen if the world imploded while on a plane. I felt like this was a nice little send up to The Langoliers too.

"Warbirds" by David J. Schow (2 stars)-Way too technical for me and just boring honestly.

"The Flying Machine" by Ray Bradbury (1 star)-....no. That's all I got at this point. I also at this point started sneak reading another book. 

"Zombies on a Plane" by Bev Vincent (4 stars)-It was an interesting idea and I loved the callback to the Snakes on a Plane movie. It just needed a bit more oomph for me. I loved the idea of a zombie virus taking everyone as soon as you die, so you don't need to be bit to change. I think The Walking Dead has that same premise too right? Or it did. I don't know, I stopped watching that show this year because I got sick of it. 

"They Shall Not Grow Old' By Richard Dahl (3 stars)-This story actually felt a little long and I lost interest in it half way through.

"Murder in the Air" by Peter Tremayne (5 stars)-A locked room murder mystery on a plane. Heck King even points out it's a double locked room murder mystery if you count the plane as being locked too. I loved it. That is all.  

"The Turbulence Expert" by Stephen King (5 stars)- I liked the why behind this story. It also echoes some Richard Bachman in my eyes too. 

"Falling" by James Dickey (1 stars)-It's a very long poem. My eyes glazed over two pages in unfortunately.