From the author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes this extraordinary thriller about airline safety, business intrigue, and a deadly cover-up.
At a moment when the issue of safety and death in the skies is paramount in the public mind, a lethal midair disaster aboard a commercial twin-jet airliner flying from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressured and frantic investigation in which the greatest casualty may be the truth.
Review:
The genre of this book is quite hard to pin down, but I think I'll call it an industrial/business mystery. The mystery? What caused the midair disaster. The investigators? A team of department heads from the company that built the plane in question. If you want something to compare this book to I'd say it reads like an uber-detailed episode of Mayday.
When I first started this book, I was worried that it would be boringly slow because I thought there wasn't much room in the premise for a thrilling plot. I'm happy to say that I was wrong. The pace becomes downright frenzied/frantic near the end. The book did start slow though, and took it's time building up steam and suspense. In the end, it wasn't the most intense thriller in the world, but it was probably the best Crichton could do with this premise.
My only other major problem with this book was how there wasn't one big antagonist -there were 2-3 smaller ones instead. Doing this really took some of the fun/tension out of the book.
There were also a few puzzling events/detailed left irritatingly unexplained which I will not detail here because they would spoil the story.
Oh, and yes there is strong language (read: f-words) used here, which interrupt the flow of the novel here more than they did in Prey or Rising Sun but not half as much as they did in BZRK, so I didn't really find it to be a big problem.
All in all a pretty decent thriller. Not Crichton's best, but not his worst either. Recommended to fans of Mayday or anyone interested in planes, thrillers, or television journalism.
4/5 stars
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