AFTERGLOW

In Dhruv’s thriller, an airline crash investigator wakes from a comatose state to learn that he might have been the victim of an attempted murder—and it may be connected to a case he’s been working on.

After Raj Putnam of the National Transportation Safety Board wakes from more than 26 weeks in a coma—he’d been hit in the head with a golf ball while enjoying a round—he finds he’s suffering from significant memory loss. He’s surprised that two law enforcement agents, Det. Broom with the Seattle Police Department and FBI Agent Tommy Sharpe, are eager to chat with him. They want to find former golf pro Carl Congress, the friend with whom Raj was golfing that fateful day, who vanished immediately after Raj was struck. Not only do they believe Carl tried to murder Raj, but also that he’s somehow responsible for a commercial plane’s crash into the foothills of Mount Rainier, which killed everyone on board. Carl, as it turns out, is a member of the Giovanni family, a notorious Italian criminal organization, and on that plane was Michael Coonan, who belongs to a rival Irish mob family; Coonan murdered Carl’s uncle, Sonny Giovanni, along with Sonny’s wife and child. Dhruv’s thrillingly suspenseful novel lays out a series of peculiarly coincidental facts for readers: Raj is the airline crash investigator who looked into the Mount Ranier incident, and the plane’s pilot, Saul Miller, was taking golf lessons from Carl. As the story mesmerically unfolds, Carl’s responsibility for the horrific event seems increasingly plausible, but also physically impossible. Even when the plot takes a strange turn into the supernatural, it remains remarkably believable, and this is the central accomplishment of Dhruv’s writing: to make absurdly unlikely events seem entirely credible. Overall, it’s a marvelously unpredictable novel that’s complex but never convoluted, and every page seems to promise a new, shocking revelation.

A deeply absorbing novel with impressive intelligence.