An exciting story with great details, lots of action, and an unfortunately problematic premise.
Terrorist to pilot: Crash the plane and kill everyone aboard, or your family will die.
That's the choice that faces pilot Bill Hoffman after he is FaceTimed in the cockpit of Coastal Airways Flight 416 by a man who has his wife, son, and infant daughter bound, gagged, and strapped with suicide bombs—a man he believed was a cable repairman when he left the house on his way to work. "I’m not going to crash this plane and you’re not going to kill my family," Hoffman bravely replies—but it's clearly going to take some doing. This authentically detailed and unquestionably thrilling thriller is the debut novel of a bookseller-turned–flight attendant–turned-novelist. Newman uses her background to great advantage in portraying her three flight attendants—a Black woman named Jo, a tiny White guy they call Big Daddy, and a newbie still on probation, Kellie. From their intuitive evaluations of the passengers as they board to their collaborative problem-solving style to little details like how they funnel leftover first-class meals to the pilots, these characters give the high-flying heroics of the plot a grounding in reality. Air traffic controllers and pilots are also depicted with veracity and respect. On the other hand, the FBI agents are two-dimensional, and the characterization of the villains is a serious flaw. Casting Middle Eastern men as terrorists crashing planes is dated and reactionary at this point, even if the word Islam is not mentioned once and the characters explicitly reject jihadism. These guys' avenging rage has its roots in the horror of the U.S. withdrawal from Kurdistan and the American public's complete lack of interest, but this is not enough to rescue this racist stereotype.
An exciting story with great details, lots of action, and an unfortunately problematic premise.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982177-88-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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An entertaining thriller if you can give yourself over to its sillier plot devices.
Sager returns with his take on a gothic whodunit set on the coast of Maine.
The year is 1983. Kit McDeere is a disgraced home caregiver who has one chance to redeem herself: She's assigned to look after the ailing, elderly Lenora Hope, a local Lizzie Borden figure. Back in 1929, Lenora allegedly murdered her parents and sister, and now, along with her remaining staff, she resides at Hope’s End, the Gothic mansion on Maine’s crumbling cliffs where the murders took place. Lenora can't speak following a series of strokes, but with Kit’s help, she can type, and she wants to tell her story once and for all, confiding in Kit what happened on the night of the infamous murders. The novel moves between Kit’s narration in the present and Lenora’s typewritten account of her life leading up to the incident. Early on, the novel evokes such genre classics as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Rebecca, establishing a moody atmosphere and intriguingly suspicious characters. However, this novel lacks the psychological realism of its influences. Sager doesn’t play with gothic tropes so much as he simply traffics in them. The first half of the book is tense and propulsive, but in later chapters the narrative takes so many outlandish turns so quickly that it borders on camp. Characters act in ways that are clichéd and implausible, and they are given cartoonish dialogue to match their behavior. Villains confess easily, in long speeches that strain credulity, and a subplot around paternity takes on the flavor of a telenovela. Multiple scenes involve characters emerging from doorways to reveal they were there all along. (Gasp!) That said, the novel reads quickly and provides a thrilling, if goofy, ride for those with a high tolerance for plot hijinks and a fondness for Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.
An entertaining thriller if you can give yourself over to its sillier plot devices.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780593183229
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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