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Night Over Water by Ken Follett. My expectations weren't that high, but I really loved it.
This book falls squarely in the "group of strangers, each with their own agenda, trapped together by circumstances beyond their control" genre. In this case, circumstance is a fictional flight of a real plane, the amphibious Boeing 314 Clipper. Pan Am's first trans-Atlantic flights were luxury "sleeper" flights (the seats folded into bunks) and the book fictionally extends the extremely brief tenure of the commercial Boeing 314 flights into the early days of WWII. The passengers include a family of fascists fleeing the U.K., a German scientist escaping the Nazis, saboteurs, criminals, a runaway bride, etc etc. It's a lot of fun and seems to be pretty well researched as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters' storylines wove in and out of each other, and that the female characters were as fleshed out and had as much agency and interesting backstory as the guys did.
The book also did something I really liked with sexual consent, although this is slightly spoilery and slightly NSFW, so I'll put it under a cut.
( Consent issues in the book - some spoilers )
This book falls squarely in the "group of strangers, each with their own agenda, trapped together by circumstances beyond their control" genre. In this case, circumstance is a fictional flight of a real plane, the amphibious Boeing 314 Clipper. Pan Am's first trans-Atlantic flights were luxury "sleeper" flights (the seats folded into bunks) and the book fictionally extends the extremely brief tenure of the commercial Boeing 314 flights into the early days of WWII. The passengers include a family of fascists fleeing the U.K., a German scientist escaping the Nazis, saboteurs, criminals, a runaway bride, etc etc. It's a lot of fun and seems to be pretty well researched as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters' storylines wove in and out of each other, and that the female characters were as fleshed out and had as much agency and interesting backstory as the guys did.
The book also did something I really liked with sexual consent, although this is slightly spoilery and slightly NSFW, so I'll put it under a cut.
( Consent issues in the book - some spoilers )