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The wintry skies around Washington D.C. are dropping more than rain, sleet, and snow in this chilly thriller that starts with death and destruction in a suburban neighborhood. A plane comes apart in midair and showers the ground with both aircraft and body parts. Is this disaster the unavoidable catastrophe it initially appears to be or something infinitely more sinister? Readers are soon to find out.
The relatively young and particularly attractive widow of one of the plane crash victims is reluctant to accept preliminary findings regarding the cause of the calamity. Equipment failure and pilot error are proffered, but she suspects murder and hires Frank, an independent accident investigator, to get at the truth. Frank’s previous career with the National Transportation Safety Board buttresses his ability to explore the technical questions involved, while his consideration of more malevolent possibilities is augmented by his bulldog pursuit of the truth. Before long, lies, larceny, and lethality turn a quest for answers into a battle for survival—a battle that will test Frank’s character when he has to balance putting others in harm’s way at the expense of saving his own skin.
Author Meier employs enough technical terminology to keep the pillars of his plot credible without drowning the reader in a sea of aeronautical and avionics jargon. He skillfully melds intricacies of flight, internecine corporate skullduggery, and good old-fashioned pulse-pounding action into a satisfying stew of suspense. The pace is swift, the characters are crafty, and the read is rewarding for those who like stories seasoned with plausibility. He even finds a way to make one car following another a bit of Hitchcockian drama on the printed page.