Falling

TJ Newman’s Falling is a thriller about an airliner pilot faced with an ultimatum on a previously routine flight: Crash on purpose or your family gets killed. Reading it gave me a weird feeling. Not a bad feeling, but a weird one.

I’ve seen reviews that have said “this book was clearly trying to be a movie”. And this is a very, very blatant example of this. It’s not a bad example, and neither is it a bad book. I was reminded a lot of the movie Speed, which is not exactly a horrible thing for a thriller to remind you of. But at the same time, people remember Speed a lot more than they remember the novelization of Speed, because it’s the kind of thing that’s far better told in visual format.

Not surprisingly, this book is being made into a movie. I’ll have to see how that turns out, but I’ll just say that if being too much like an action movie is the worst thing in a thriller, it’s a good thriller. Especially if it’s written by a veteran flight attendant who thus knows a thing or two about airplanes.