Platform Seven at 4am: Peterborough Railway Station is deserted. The man crossing the covered walkway on this freezing November morning is confident he’s alone. As he sits on the metal bench at the far end of the platform it is clear his choice is strategic - he’s as far away from the night staff as he can get.
What the man doesn’t realise is that he has company. Lisa Evans knows what he has decided. She knows what he is about to do as she tries and fails to stop him walking to the platform edge. Two deaths on Platform Seven. Two fatalities in eighteen months - surely they’re connected? No one is more desperate to understand what connects them than Lisa Evans herself. After all, she was the first of the two to die.

I had heard good things about this book so looked forward to reading it. Unfortunately I got about a quart of the way through and that was it. It was a DNF for me. I found myself getting a bit bored with it and I have too many books on Mount TBR to waste on something I know I’m not going to finish. ( )

I enjoy ghost narrators, and the writing was great, but this was just so slow. Over 100 pages in I was still being teased with tiny bits of info about the ghost’s past life and reading about her analysis of the passengers at the station and descriptions of the light quality for what felt like the thousandth time. By that stage, I was no longer interested enough to find out any more. ( )

It's the middle of the night on Platform 7 of the Petersborough Train Station, and a man waits on a bench, though no trains are due. A woman observes the man, and knows what he is thinking, but is powerless to stop him when shortly he throws himself in front of a freight train speeding through the station.

The woman is Lisa. And she is a ghost, or a spirit, or ethereal or at any rate not real. No one can see her, and she cannot go beyond the train station's bounds. She wants to know how she ended up here, no longer alive.

So this was an interesting mystery told from an unusual perspective. A woman is dead and her ghost must solve the mystery of how she died. That may sound kind of silly, but it's actually well done and fully believable. Most of the book is the story of Lisa's life, so it's kind of a domestic drama, with the twist that she met her end in a mysterious way, ruled suicide, but was it really?

Recommended.

3 stars ( )

Platform Seven by Louise Doughty has a premise that hooked my interest early on. In a train station on platform seven, a man has decided to commit suicide. He is watched by Lisa Evans and she knows what he plans to do because she did the same thing just 18 months earlier.

Lisa is our protagonist and she is a ghost in the afterlife, haunting Peterborough Railway Station with little memory of what happened or why she's there. Lisa enjoys watching the train station employees and the commuters come and go until the man's suicide triggers a series of events and the clearing of cobwebs in Lisa's memory.

The majority of the novel is Lisa recalling the lead up to her death and how she ended up in her current state. I don't tend to enjoy the amnesia trope on a good day and I found this part of the novel unconvincing.

Despite the creepy premise and terrifically spooky cover, Platform Seven reads more like a domestic noir novel and could easily have been marketed very differently.

The narration style put me in mind of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, as did the internal musings about life after death in general. I enjoyed Lisa's observations and feelings about some of the staff members however I was disappointed when the reader was denied one particular 'visit' I had been anticipating.

Platform Seven by Louise Doughty is a good domestic noir novel.

* Copy courtesy of Allen & Unwin * ( )

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I picked up a book narrated by a ghost stuck on Peterborough Railway station, but it certainly wasn't something as dark as this. It goes to some pretty dark places of the human soul, and I can see this being quite distressing to some people.
Having said that, it has a lot going for it if you're prepared to follow it. For one, the geography is bang on - I know the area well enough to be able to follow hwe on her perambulations from the station, and yes, that Waitrose has an epic pastry counter! >:-p
Lisa Evans is a ghost and we first meet her when she is aware of a man who takes his life by falling under a train from Platrform Seven of Pdeterborough Railway station. We follow her as she lurks around the station, unable to leave the boundaries of the station land in the first instance. She follows the staff as they deal with the differenty stages of the investigation and thei day to day lifer. She gets tied up in their lives as a voyeur, unable to actually contact them or do anything to the living. Things change as the investigation in to the death leads to her case also being rexamined and we then discover what leads Lisa to her current state. It iisn't a mystery that she ends up under a train, but the whys that led her to that fate are tense and you find yourself willing a different ending. It covers some difficult topics, suicide, spousal and child abuse (both physicaland psycological) without, to this reader ,appearing to pull her punches. Hence this could be distressing. I found it a bit like a car crash in slow motion, you wanted to look away, but something abhout it meant I kept reading - there is something in wanting to make Lisa's death not be in vain that you have to act as witness to her life in all it's misery.
It was moving and yet had moments of great depth of emotion as well as lightness. The final thought I am elft with is that of the final chapter, which is if hope, strangely, she exponds the idea that no-one is dead while the people they have touched, the ripples of their life, if you like, remain alive. And that the people we love are with us in our love and memories even when they are no longer physically present. It's a surprisingly hopeful last note in a book that goes to some very dark places (and not just Peterborough on a wet December evenbing). ( )