I've been meaning to read this for ages, and it finally came off hold at the library, so here we are! A horror story about the Titanic, as if it wasn't horrifying enough all on its own. An enjoyable horror story, too, although I have to admit that the part of it that most interested me was flicking back and forth between the text and the internet, looking up passengers mentioned in the book to see if they were (first of all) real, and (second of all) accurately portrayed. For the most part it seems yes to both, or so my very cursory searches indicate. I always admire historical novels where you see the sheer amount of work and research that has gone into them, and that's certainly the case here.

I did find the research a little more interesting than the characters, though. No, that's not quite it. The characters were interesting people, it's just that I found many of them unsympathetic, which seems a horrible thing to say about people who die awfully in tragedy. This wasn't even the case for all of them (the unsympathy, not the tragedy), but the quadrangle of Annie-Lillian-Mark-Caroline was particularly irritating. It's not that Annie's unpleasant, exactly, but she's so... wet, and I say that laughing at the very poor taste of the wording. She's got narrative reasons for being so (this is a horror story, after all), and for the life of me I can't understand why any woman anywhere would be so attached to Mark. He's terrible. Whiny and selfish and weak, downright murderous towards the end. So, yeah, not quite as convinced by the relationships as I am by the research, and the horror factor could have been ratcheted up a little more, but still. Glad I read it, and I'll be keeping an eye out for the author in the future.