If you’re a train traveller, Anna Maloney’s debut thriller The 10:12 may spark a few vivid nightmares. It probably takes a little longer to read about this ill-fated Manchester-to-London journey on the fictional NorthRail than the ride itself would take. Maloney’s meticulous minute-by-minute description of how ordinary people try to protect themselves from a group of violent hijackers calls forth a full range of human emotions – fear, anger, compassion, selflessness, courage and love. The book was one of Val McDermid’s celebrated New Blood picks at Harrogate 2026 and has just come out in the US and now the Crime Fiction Lover review has rolled into the station, so to speak…
At the centre of this logistical and emotional maelstrom is Claire Fitzroy, a 58-year-old art instructor seated in the train’s last occupied car. Early on, the hijackers murder a man in Claire’s car, should anyone doubt their seriousness. One of them breaks into the loo where she’s hiding, and she inadvertently stabs him when the train lurches and he jerks forward onto the knife she holds. She was only intending to subdue him until other passengers could tie him up, but now she’s a killer. Help arrives in the form of another passenger, this one with military experience.
If hijackers armed with guns and knives and machetes aren’t enough to deal with, word comes that an IED is planted aboard. A bit like the 1994 movie Speed, if the passengers try to stop the train, the bomb will detonate. Passengers in Claire’s car are of many minds about what should be done. For most of them, that means doing nothing. Weeping, perhaps. But Claire, the ex-military man and a few others strategise on how to capture and disarm the hijackers in cars farther forward. What they attempt, what they accomplish, and what the results are occupies the first half of the book.
But this isn’t quite an action thriller like Speed. You know from the outset that Claire survives the ordeal because she’s now written a book about it. Interspersed with the story of the 10:12 are notes from her editor, bits of trial transcript and text messages between frantic passengers and their equally frantic family members. The train is finally stopped before it reaches the busy Euston Station in Central London, where the hijackers intend it to crash, achieving maximum carnage.
Claire is in the awkward position of being hailed as a hero by most people, while a target for hate mail and threats by those who, for whatever reason, ally themselves with the hijackers. Most interesting to me is how her age is used against her, as if a woman over 40 shouldn’t be brave, should just sit back and knit. Even some of her fellow passengers say she was too aggressive and tried to be the ringleader of those taking action to defend other passengers. Claire believes it was a group effort. It is exasperating to read how her gender and age are held against her. That attitude seems both very unfair and very realistic, alas. In fact, for me, the train journey ordeal took on extra power because of the author’s insights into human behaviour. Given such a perilous situation, not everyone behaves rationally, nor as they would want to, nor as they should.
The second half of the book involves the trial of the hijackers and Claire’s efforts to get to the root of their actions. It transpires that the gang hardly knew one another and had no coherent plan, just internet-fed antipathy toward vague targets: the Chinese, the Deep State and so on – staples of the conspiracy theory catalogue. Claire is not satisfied. People died, two of them at her hands. She is in contact with many of the passengers, trying to understand how they viewed the events, why they were on that particular train, and whether there are unknown connections among the hijackers. Over time, she gradually does develop a theory, though she’s discouraged at every turn by MI5 and the police, who want her to leave any investigating to the authorities and not attract more unwanted attention to herself and her family.
Also in the background is Claire’s marriage to her husband, James. Early in the story, she visits James’s brother and wife on her way to catch the London train, and the brother lets it slip that James is planning to leave her. He’s taken up knifemaking and (conveniently) gives her one of his handmade kitchen knives, which is the one the hijacker impales himself on. After the tragic train trip, Claire and James reevaluate their partnership, which itself is a sensitive and complex story. It is to the author’s credit that she doesn’t create a too simplistic approach to this relationship, either.
In sum, it’s an adventure worthy of the long history of crimes set aboard trains – from Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and the 4:50 from Paddington to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train to those Crime Fiction Lover assembled over a decade ago. They lend themselves nicely to movies too, and Anna Maloney comes by her sense of the visual quite naturally, having written for television and taught screenwriting. The opening section of The 10:12 won the 2022 CWA Debut Dagger award.
Raven Books
Print/Kindle/iBook
£ 11.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars