The Book:
The Business Trip by Jessie Garcia
Published January 14, 2025 by St. Martin’s Press
Date read: December 5, 2024
Find more January 2025 releases here.
The Business Trip spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.
The Characters:
Stephanie
Jasmine
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
Stephanie and Jasmine have nothing and everything in common. The two women don’t know each other but are on the same plane. Stephanie is on a business trip and Jasmine is fleeing an abusive relationship. After a few days, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man—the messages becoming stranger and more erratic.
And then the two women vanish. The texts go silent, the red flags go up, and the panic sets in. When Stephanie and Jasmine are each declared missing and in danger, it begs the questions: Who is Trent McCarthy? What did he do to these women— or what did they do to him?
Twist upon twist, layer upon layer, where nothing is as it seems, THE BUSINESS TRIP takes you on a descent into the depths of a mastermind manipulator. But who is playing who?
The Business Trip Spoilers
The Reveal:
Jasmine was our villain. The story is told in an interesting way where it starts with Jasmine and Stephanie’s POVs the day of their flight, then switches to the perspective of all the people they left behind in their real lives. Once the reader knows something isn’t right, it switches back to Jasmine’s POV for the truth.
Jasmine and Stephanie were seated next to each other on their flight. Jasmine got mad because she thought Stephanie was just one of those girls who got it all. She decided to take over Stephanie’s life, but to do so she would have to kill her. Jasmine stole Stephanie’s ID on the plane. She bought a ticket on Stephanie’s connection to San Diego, changed her hair to look like her, and waited until Stephanie went to sleep that night. She used Stephanie’s ID to say she lost her key and was able to get another to access her room. Stephanie had taken an Ambien so was passed out. Jasmine smothered her with a pillow, put her body in a big suitcase, and then attended the conference as Stephanie the next day. She had rented a van with a wheelchair lift, which she used to lift the body-containing suitcase into the van and then go dump it at a secluded beach.
Trent was obviously a creep, so Jasmine decided to frame him. Once she followed him to Atlanta, she asked her high school friend Raven to get her a fake passport so she could escape to Mexico.
In Mexico, Jasmine really thought she had gotten away with it. One day she saw Raven on the news though and knew the jig was up. She was just about to kill another girl to steal another identity when Stephanie and the police showed up.
Stephanie had wanted an escape from her real life, so as a bit of a joke she had hired an actress from a “find your doppelganger” website to pose as her at the conference. The real Stephanie had flown to Mexico for a short vacation, and her doppelganger Diana was the one that Jasmine killed. Stephanie had helped the police find Jasmine once she realized what had happened. (I don’t get why Diana had Stephanie’s phone though. Wouldn’t Stephanie have kept her own phone to correspond with her catsitter and son, even if Diana was posing as her at the conference?)
The Ending:
Stephanie left her job and switched to PR. Trent approached her one day and was in fact an ass. (He had been released and cleared of all suspicion once Jasmine was arrested). He wanted Stephanie to write a book that he could take the credit for.
I hope these The Business Trip spoilers were helpful.
The Review:
Quite gripping and intricately compsed! I’m a sucker for books set on airplanes/in airports, but beyond that I had no preconceptions about this book. I expected a sort of Strangers on a Train theme from the description, but what I got was way better.
Go in blind for this one, because even mentioning why I liked it so much would be a spoiler. The ending is a bit far-fetched, but if you’re willing to suspend belief and enjoy the ride it’s well worth it.
I’m looking forward to seeing what else Garcia puts out!
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