Falling: A Novel (edición 2021)

Captain Bill Hoffman heads to the airport for what he thinks will be a normal cross-country flight from LA to NYC..he has no idea how wrong he is. Within moments of Hoffman leaving his home, his family is taken hostage. Shortly after his flight takes off, he receives a strange message which has a video of his wife bound, gagged, and wearing a suicide vest. Hoffman is given a choice - either he crashes the plane and saves his family or he saves his family and crashes the plane killing all 143 people on board. He must make a choice.

This is the first book written by T.J. Newman. Newman is a flight attendant which gives this story something extra in my opinion. This was a fast-paced well-told thriller. There were some moments where I thought I knew who the bad guy on board was only to realize that I based my thought on how I believed a terrorist would act. I loved the way the flight attendants were portrayed in this story - while it was the pilot who had to make a choice about crashing the plane, in truth, it was the flight attendants who held the passengers together when it was needed the most. ( )

Boy, this book became a page turner. Something to enjoy over the summer. She was able to make the “ plane crash” genre fresh. It’s notable that the author is a woman. She said gaining the respect of the “ old boys club” to research technical issues about the aircraft was not easily achieved. ( )

This book was great entertainment! What a clever premise, and I was eager to find out how it was going to be resolved.

Captain Bill Hoffman is piloting a flight from LAX to JFK with 143 passengers on board. Just as the flight reaches cruising altitude, Bill receives an email. His wife and two kids have been kidnapped, and in order for his family to live, he has to crash the plane. And there is a mole on board to ensure that Bill follows instructions. Bill has to make an impossible choice. What will he do?

Whoo, this was a rollercoaster ride. With chapters alternating between what's happening in the air and what's happening on the ground, the reader knows more than any of the principal characters, but not so much that we know how the situation will get resolved. I appreciated that the terrorists were not depicted as purely evil; there is a human side to them that makes the situation all the more terrifying and heartbreaking.

Thanks to author T.J. Newman's ten years of experience as a commercial flight attendant, the scenes on board the flight were very authentic, detailed, and REAL. I thoroughly enjoyed this book! ( )

Grymt actionfylld bok som ger järnet från sida ett. Inga krusiduller, B-Action i bokform. Väldigt underhållande läsning. ( )

If you can suspend disbelief here and there, you'll really enjoy FALLING. I did, and so did everyone else in my book group. FALLING is a fast read because you won't want to put it down.

Terrorists have given an airline pilot a choice: crash his plane with 140 "souls" onboard and save the lives of his kidnapped family, or land the plane, saving passengers and crew but resulting in his family's deaths. His answer is that neither the people on the plane nor his family are going to die. At that I admit that the book is ultimately predictable, but it was so much fun to read about how everyone--the passengers and crew on the plane, the pilot's wife and two children, the two (yes, just two) terrorists, the FBI, the air traffic controllers, the President of the United States, and even the baseball players and fans at Yankee Stadium--learned about and dealt with this terrorist threat.

My criticism is T.J. Newman's waste of time describing the pilot's dreams. They add nothing of consequence to the story.

Others poke holes in this story and criticize its authenticity. I don't at all. I'd be willing to bet that, once you start FALLING, you'll be willing to suspend disbelief and you won't want to stop. ( )