BAND OF BROTHERS

This is a somewhat lighter manifest than some of Gann's earlier novels but it travels smoothly from here to there, there being the Taipei International Airport after a Boeing 727 crashed before reaching it -- 14 killed, 46 injured -- among them pilot Alex Malloy, now a hull of his former self in a wheelchair and tried and found guilty of negligence. But Malloy was a perfectionist with an ""uncanny record"" and a friend, Lew Horn, is determined to show that something else was wrong -- perhaps his first officer Wu, perhaps other less evident influences in the so-called Republic of China. And there's a shadow of an incomplete romance... Mr. Gann's readership needs no direction finder needle -- they fly him anywhere.