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 different is Carrie Hoffman and her two children become an equal thread of the story; they carry on their own war of wits with their captor just as much as her husband does in the cockpit of the plane. And what is equally gripping is the way Hoffman’s only ally in the air is Jo Watkins, the head of the service crew — but Jo just happens to have a nephew in the FBI — but Theo Baldwin’s standing with his bosses is not the strongest. This in some ways is an intriguing subplot — the internal conflicts within the FBI raise more spectre of the terrorists succeeding than they do of their being caught. And oh, just so you know, the hijacker with Bill’s family has told him they’ve got someone on the plane keeping an eye on everything he does.

It is a tremendous set up, which Newman works like an experienced pro, building to confrontations and climaxes which resolve only to lead to more. There are some familiar aspects (Theo’s young, slightly off-center FBI agent…