T.J. NEWMAN’S FALLING: THE HIGHEST OF HIGH CONCEPT THRILLERS

You have your high concept novels, and then you have your HIGH high concept novels, 35,000 feet high to be precise. That’s where the heart of Falling is set, on a an airliner bound from Los Angeles to New York, carrying 143 passengers, which gets hijacked.

But not in the usual way. Captain Bill Hoffman’s family in LA is being held hostage, and if he does not crash his plane at the terrorist kidnappers’ command, they will die.

Falling comes heavily hyped. First-time novelist T.J. Newman is following that old rule, write about what you know. She was a flight attendant who wrote much of the book while working on cross-country red eye flights. Her novel was rejected by 41 agents before finally being taken on by Shane Salerno’s Story Factory — she got the support of other fine writers — and then sold for publishing around the world and a huge film deal. The often-rejected angle is a good one for PR, the flight attendant connection even better, but the reality is this novel lives up to that hype, first and most importantly because it works as a pure thriller which drives the reader who needs to know what is going to happen next.

The hostage family scenario is not new — it was used most memorably in The Friends Of Eddie Coyle for Artie Scalice’s gang to pull off Boston bank robberies. But what is…