The plane is jam-packed. Every seat is taken. So of course the flight is delayed!
Flight attendant Allegra Patel likes her job—she’s generally happy with her life, even if she can’t figure out why she hooks up with a man she barely speaks to—but today is her twenty-eighth birthday. She can think of plenty of things she’d rather be doing than placating a bunch of grumpy passengers.
There’s the well-dressed man in seat 4C who is compulsively checking his watch, desperate not to miss his eleven-year-old daughter’s musical. Further back, a mother of two is frantically trying to keep her toddler entertained and her infant son quiet. How did she ever think being a stay-at-home mom would be easier than being a lawyer? Ethan is lost in thought; he’s flying back from his first funeral. A young couple has just gotten married; she’s still wearing her wedding dress. An emergency room nurse is looking forward to traveling the world once she retires in a few years, it’s going to be so much fun! If they ever get off the tarmac. . . .
Suddenly a woman none of them know stands up. She makes predictions about how and when everyone on board will die. …
How would you live your life if you thought you knew how it would end? Would you love who you love or try to love someone else? Would you stay married? Would you stop drinking? Would you call up your ex-best friend you haven’t spoken to in years? Would you quit your job?
For me it was less a plot than a series of slices of life. The characters unrelated — other than their reactions to what happened on the plane.
At times I found the book long.
Still — it’s unique. And it will make you consider your own life.
Are YOU living each day as if you already know the year of your death?
Unfortunately, the plot is even more absurd than usual. I was tempted to quit.
As the book opens, President Lucas Kent is meeting with General Wayne Grissom, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the White House. …
Violent attacks have been peppering the nation, and Kent and Grissom don’t know if foreign or domestic terrorists are to blame — or a combination of both. Their fear is that there will be bigger and deadlier ones, culminating in an unprecedented attack on the nation’s capital. …
Sampson goes on a clandestine mission in which no cavalry will be called upon to bail him out should it all go sideways. …
Borrowing its basic plot structure from Agatha Christie‘s And Then There Were None (Christie’s book is directly referenced by some of the characters at several points), it tells the story of a group of seven university students who travel to a deserted island that was the scene of a grisly mass murder six months earlier, where events soon turn ominous.
Letty Davenport a young college girl receives a call from Skye a traveler she met briefly in San Francisco.
Remembering that Letty’s adoptive father is a detective she requests help in finding her companion Henry, who has just gone missing.
Soon Skye is missing as well and Detective Lucas Davenport decides to investigate further. He soon finds himself pursuing a drug dealer named Pilate in a chance that crosses state lines and exposes him to variety of sub cultures and their gatherings.
It evolves out of corruption during Boston’s Big Dig — the most expensive highway project in the United States, plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, accusations of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal charges and arrests.
When former investigative reporter Rick Hoffman loses his job, fiancée, and apartment, his only option is to move back into–and renovate–the home of his miserable youth, now empty and in decay since the stroke that put his father in a nursing home.
As Rick starts to pull apart the old house, he makes an electrifying discovery—millions of dollars hidden in the walls.
It’s enough money to completely transform Rick’s life—and everything he thought he knew about his father.
Yet the more of his father’s hidden past that Rick brings to light, the more dangerous his present becomes. Soon, he finds himself on the run from deadly enemies desperate to keep the past buried, and only solving the mystery of his father—a man who has been unable to communicate, comprehend, or care for himself for almost 20 years—will save Rick…if he can survive long enough to do it.
This book is too long. Too slow. And nobody would make the obvious mistakes Rick Hoffman does … BUT I still recommend it.
John Sandford is the writer I’ve been reading most over the past couple of months.
As I post, he’d published 34 books in the Prey series, featuring Lucas Davenport.
Eyes of Prey (1991) is only the 3rd book. And it’s very, very dark.
Davenport was depressed, maniacal, suicidal — not far removed from the serial killers he chased.
John Sandford:
Eyes of Prey was the third of the Lucas Davenport series, and, in my opinion, a genuinely nasty book. The first book, Rules of Prey, caught some thriller-fan attention because it was tough — a bad killer, and a bad cop chasing him. Even the Wall Street Journal liked it.
Then, in the second book, Shadow Prey, the bad guys got softer. In fact, the bad guys weren’t all that bad, really, but got killed anyway, which meant there was some moral ambiguity floating around in the punch bowl.
The doctor ordered a little more starkness in the third novel, and I got it with a couple of killers named Carlo Druze and Dr. Michael Bekker. Druze, though, was just a killer. Bekker was a raving blinkin’ maniac, and he’s the one that women seem to like.
Freida McFadden (born May 1, 1980) is the pen name of an American thriller author and practicing physician specializing in brain injury.
She began writing as a hobby, self-publishing starting 2013.
Her 2022 book The Housemaid was an international bestseller.
She’s known for the twists and turns in her plots. And unreliable narrators.
Tegan is eight months pregnant, alone, and desperately wants to put her crumbling life in the rearview mirror. So she hits the road, planning to stay with her brother until she can figure out her next move. But she doesn’t realize she’s heading straight into a blizzard.
She never arrives at her destination.
Stranded in rural Maine with a dead car and broken ankle, Tegan worries she’s made a terrible mistake. Then a miracle occurs: she is rescued by a couple who offers her a room in their warm cabin until the snow clears.
At the beginning of this book series, Lucas Davenport — the good guy — wasn’t much better than the criminals he chased.
But over time he became increasingly likeable.
Night Prey (2024) is only 6th in the series. But Davenport is already showing signs of humanity.
State Investigator Meagan Connell believes that Minneapolis has a serial killer on its hands, a killer who has stepped up the frequency of his attacks. Connell is dying of cancer and is determined to catch the killer in the few weeks she has left.
Davenport is called in for his expertise in serial murder.
The BAD GUY this time is an elusive cat burglar obsessed with a woman.
It’s a gritty police procedural trying to find the villain.
Rick McCharles 