By T.J. Newman (Avid Reader Press; 2021)
I’m not sure that anyone was calling for a post-9/11 throwback to the airplane thrillers of old, but it’s here. FALLING, the unabashedly commercial suspensor, written by a flight attendant while on the job—and reportedly submitted to 41 agents before finally securing a pair of extremely lucrative book and movie deals—hits all the bases of those aerial themed books and/or movies (which include the AIRPORT bestselling novel and film, and the flicks AIRPORT 1975, AIRPORT ‘77, THE CONCORDE…AIRPORT ‘79, EXECUTIVE DECISION, TURBULENCE and SNAKES ON A PLANE), wherein some unthinkable disaster descends upon an airplane shortly after take-off, leading to panic, mayhem and the pilot becoming incapacitated, forcing either a flight attendant or an unwitting passenger to land the plane.
In FALLING the plane in question is piloted by the upstanding Southern California family man Bill Hoffman, who as the novel opens boards a flight to New York. Shortly after taking off he receives a facetime call from a guy who’s entered Bill’s house and taken his wife and two children hostage. The intruder’s demand: gas all the passengers via a metal canister filled with poison and then crash the plane in some politically strategic location. If Bill elects not to follow those instructions, the man promises he’ll kill his hostages.
The guy, it transpires, is a Kurd, and pissed about the US government’s abandonment of the region in 2019, leaving it to be overrun by Turkish attackers. Hence there’s a political angle, although it doesn’t compromise the novel’s storytelling momentum.
I’ll keep mum on precisely what transpires, outside the fact that it involves a big-hearted flight attendant, a determined FBI agent, a resourceful airline traffic controller and a strategically placed terrorist mole onboard the plane. It’s all extremely well-orchestrated in a vivid and cinematic style, with the requisite suspense novel accoutrements: a large cast of reasonably well developed characters, chapters that always end with cliffhangers and an escalating series of crises.
The author’s insider knowledge of all things aerial shines through in the many telling details, and in frankly worded passages like this one: “After all, a flight is just a random sample of the general population, a classic bell curve. A few assholes and a few exemplars, but primarily, a whole bunch of sheep.” That authenticity, alas, doesn’t extend to a climactic motorcycle dash to So Cal’s Dockweiler Beach, a sequence that’s heavily reliant on unlikely coincidences and contains geography that (speaking as one who lives near Dockweiler) is, frankly, whacked (no mention is made of the fact that said beach is bordered by a massive sewage treatment plant, although it may be what the author is attempting to describe in her mention of “a kind of municipal maintenance sight or something of that sort”).
But then again, this is commercially-minded beach reading, meaning close analysis is ill-advised. Ultimately FALLING delivers just what it promises: thrill-packed old school catastrophe porn with all the trimmings.