As I travel for 2 hours on a train every day, I get through a fair amount of books per week. I had just finished "Pandora's Clock" by John Nance, and wanted more in the "airplane disaster" theme. This looked like a model example of the genre, with a "lethal mid air disaster", giving connotations of pilots nursing a ruined airliner throughout the book, until a heart-stopping heavy landing at the end.
Instead, the disaster was over in a few pages (there must be another one, I thought) with the real subject of the book being the back stabbing bureaucracy of a commercial airline. It was not what I expected, but very good all the same.
Micheal Crichton keeps the suspense up as a safety team try to solve the puzzle against the clock. A vital foreign sale is threatened by the series of accidents, and an answer is wanted. With the press baying at the companies heels, the main character is put under severe stress on all sides, with the workers angry at a decision to move construction out of the country, resulting in chaos throughout the factory.
This adds up to an absolute thriller of a book, which actually made me want to catch the train. As I am of a fairly technical nature, I enjoyed his in-depth descriptions of intricate aeroplane systems, but I can understand that this is not for everyone.
I cannot make your mind up for you, but if you find aeroplanes one of the more fascinating inventions of the 20th century, or just like a good techno-thriller, then I cannot recommend this book enough.
I will end with an extract from the back cover of the book, to let you see if you like it or not.
Three passengers are dead. Fifty-six are injured. The interior
cabin virtually destroyed. But the pilot manages to land the
plane...
At a moment when the issue of safety and death in the skies is paramount in the public mind, a lethal midair disaster aboard a commercial twin-jet airliner bound from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressured and frantic investigation.