This Summer's Best Thriller
In “Before the Fall” (Grand Central Publishing, 2016), author Noah Hawley delivers a taut and expertly paced suspense novel.
Hawley’s fifth book delivers in so many ways: a cast of well-drawn characters, feints, red herrings and dogged investigators who eventually uncover the truth. And, unlike many of today’s police procedurals, murder mysteries or suspense novels, this one keeps readers guessing until the final, tragic unveiling.
Bravo, Mr. Hawley.
The author is perhaps best known for his TV and film work. He currently is the showrunner for the FX television series, “Fargo,” which won a Peabody award. (Never watched it, despite my friends’ fevered recommendations.) He was a writer and producer for the first three seasons of the TV series, “Bones,” and also created “The Unusuals” and “My Generation.”
The opening of “Before the Fall” brings the reader aboard a private jet idling on a runway on Martha’s Vineyard. Its passengers – two powerful and powerfully wealthy families and one failed artist – board for a quick nighttime trip to New York.
David Bateman – a media mogul whose network sounds a lot like Fox – has chartered the jet. His trophy wife, Maggie, is actually a down-to-earth former preschool teacher who seems incredulous that the family travels on chartered jets and has round-the-clock domestic security. She is uneasy. Is the cause of her disquiet flying through this humid, foggy August night, or is it a premonition? The Batemans have a 9-year-old daughter, Rachel, and 4-year-old son, JJ. They travel with a bodyguard, Gil, one of many security measures taken after Rachel was kidnapped as a toddler.
Accompanying the Batemans are Ben Kipling, a wolf of Wall Street, and his wife Sarah, who greets Maggie, whom she barely knows, with “Darling! I love your dress.” The last passenger, an unlikely addition, is Scott Burroughs, a recovering alcoholic and failed artist who in mid-life has found new enthusiasm for his work. He’s flying rather than taking the ferry after striking up a friendship with Maggie at the farmers’ market.
The other people on the plane are the pilot, copilot and a female flight attendant.
Hawley writes: “They are flying. And as they rise up through the foggy white, talking and laughing, serenaded by songs of 1950s crooners and the white noise of the long at bat (the men are watching a baseball game), none of them has any idea that sixteen minutes from now their plane will crash into the sea.”
Miraculously, Scott and JJ survive. Hawley describes Scott’s Herculean eight-hour swim to shore – JJ in tow – in nerve-racking and poignant detail. One of Scott’s recollections as he swims – fighting fear, exhaustion and a killer wave – is seeing his boyhood hero, fitness guru Jack LaLanne, pull a boat through water while handcuffed. That experience inspired him to become an endurance swimmer, and ultimately saved his life.
But planes don’t just fall from the sky. What brought down the jet with its high-profile cargo? Was it Kipling, who faces jail and ignominy when he learns just before the flight that he will be indicted for money laundering? Or perhaps revenge by one of the criminal governments with whom Kipling did business? And what about Scott, who survived the crash and whose reputation – and the value of his paintings – both benefited by the disaster? Then there’s Bill Cunningham. Once the darling of Bateman’s network, the talk-show host (an amalgam of Bill O’Reilly, Howard Stern and Larry King) faced lawsuits and firing because of phone tapping. The plane crash saves him, and then some, as he wages a one-man “investigation” into the crash.
Hawley moves effortlessly between the after-the-crash narrative and the back stories of those on the plane.
Ultimately, the big reveal is a punch to the gut, but completely believable and plausible. In fact, heartbreakingly plausible.
