Starred review from June 1, 2023
Newman follows up her spectacular debut, Falling (2021), soon to be a major motion picture, with another ambitious story about a commercial airliner in trouble. Minutes after it takes off, an Airbus A321 ditches in the Pacific Ocean. Most of the passengers and crew evacuate, but not all: a handful of people are still on board as the plane sinks, coming to rest a few hundred feet below the surface. A small pocket of air is keeping them alive, and rescuers are on the way. But there's no established procedure for pulling crash survivors out of a submerged aircraft, and time is running out. This isn't the first submerged-airliner story, but it is certainly the most realistic. Newman, a former flight attendant, takes a nuts-and-bolts approach. What are the practical challenges of the rescue operation? What would the survivors inside the plane do to keep themselves alive? Where Falling was essentially a good-guys-versus-bad-guys story, this one is completely different: a race against time where the villain is time itself--if the rescuers can't beat it, the people on the plane die. A brilliantly conceived, rigorously developed thriller that should keep readers glued to their chairs.
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Starred review from April 15, 2023
A spectacular aviation thriller that readers will be relieved to know is fiction. Just off the coast of Hawaii, Flight 1421's engine explodes minutes after takeoff with 99 souls aboard. With no controls, "the plane was dead in the air," and the pilot makes an emergency landing into the Pacific Ocean, with inevitable but disastrous results. Although some people perish on impact, "the worst was yet to come." The survivors are left with a Hobson's choice: escape the airplane and hope the burning jet fuel on the ocean's surface doesn't kill them or stay in the fuselage and probably drown when it sinks and is crushed by the depths. Twelve passengers and crew remain alive in the Airbus, including Will Kent and his 11-year-old daughter, Shannon. On a nearby island, Will's soon-to-be-ex-wife Chris learns about the crash and decides to help in the rescue efforts. By an amazing coincidence, she just happens to have all the engineering, scuba diving, and spot-welding chops to complement her fierce Mama Bear personality. Meanwhile, Will convinces a few passengers to stay inside the sinking fuselage as they desperately look for ways to keep the structure watertight. In an important subplot, Will and Chris separately reflect on what had gone so terribly wrong in their family: Their older daughter, Annie, had died years before, and neither parent knows how to cope with that pain. Now Chris faces still more losses: her family, the remaining passengers and crew, and perhaps her own life. The wrecked Airbus is balanced on the precipice of a cliff 200 feet below the surface, close to the limits of where anyone can come to help. If it falls off the edge, all hope is lost. If readers can get past a few hair-raising and cringeworthy early scenes, they'll find themselves engrossed in this darned good thriller. A taut, gripping yarn. Not for the weak-kneed.
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