THE LAST FLIGHT by Julie Clark

Two women, both running away from dangerous men, swap tickets and identities in an airport.  The implausibility of this occurrence becomes less so, thanks to a revelation late in the book, so don’t let that turn you off.  Claire is the wife of a smarmy politician who beats her regularly.  Eva is a chemist who cooks drugs in her basement and then distributes them to Berkeley students needing some extra wakefulness.  After the ticket/identity swap, Claire moves into Eva’s Berkeley home, and Eva may or may not actually board a flight to Puerto Rico that crashes into the ocean.  Then the author splits the book into two timelines—Eva’s backstory and Claire’s new life, inhabiting a world with an unknown future.  The upside to the plane crash, for Claire, is that everyone, including her husband, assumes she is dead.  Until he finds out otherwise, she has time to settle into the deception regarding her identity.  The unraveling of her ruse is just as suspenseful as Eva’s dilemma as to whether she should cooperate with the authorities or try to disappear.  This is not a perfect thriller by any means, but the disclosure at the end regarding the airport encounter between the two women was a biggie for me.  Along the way, though, we get to know two women who are trying to shed their oppressed past and carve out a life that they define on their own terms.