In the propulsive thriller Falling, former flight attendant T.J. Newman imagines her crew's worst nightmare.
The debut novelist, who quit flying in 2019, opens with quintessential family man Bill Hoffman, a Coastal Airways pilot who's missing his son's Little League game to steer a transcontinental flight as a favor for his boss. His wife isn't happy with him, but he's too focused on the task at hand to give her more than a guilty excuse. In a rather dramatic karmic response, as Bill launches his plane into the sky, he quickly learns his family has been taken hostage by the Internet repairman he passed earlier that morning. Through a live video stream, the repairman-turned-terrorist presents the pilot with a choice: crash your plane when and where I instruct or watch your family die before your eyes. Bill hatches a plot to rescue both his loved ones and the souls on board his vessel, with the help of his flight attendants--one of whom has a nephew in the FBI.
It's difficult to ignore the haze of 9/11 that hangs over this novel. Newman, to her credit, makes the terrorist an empathetic character who's furious at how the U.S. has repeatedly made promises and then reneged, resulting in thousands of his Kurdish countrymen killed. Every scene in Falling, a #1 Indie Next Pick,feels like it moves faster and faster; every choice Bill makes feels on the precipice of death. And Newman draws on her airline know-how to build a realistic portrayal of an in-flight emergency response. Newman has devised a visceral action-adventure that will leave those reading with bated breath. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer