The Three

March 31, 2014
Lotz has published “urban horror” and young adult zombie novels with collaborators and under pseudonyms, but this disappointing book is the first to appear under her real name. Its premise is promising: four planes crash on the same day in Japan, South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom, respectively, leaving three survivors, all young children: Hiro in Japan, Bobby in New York, and Jessica in London (no one, apparently, survived the crash in Johannesburg). The very act of their survival and the coincidence of the crashes understandably unnerve the whole world and prompt all manner of conspiracy theories (terrorists? aliens?), which go viral, of course, online. One adult, Pamela May Donald, a devout Christian from Texas, survives the crash in Japan long enough to phone her husband, and her final words provide opportunistic televangelists the chance to proclaim this a harbinger of the Rapture. The novel is presented in the guise of a nonfiction book, Black Thursday: From Crash to Conspiracy by Elspeth Martins, which is itself a pastiche of every conceivable genre: chat room transcripts, blog posts, news articles, and interviews (no chapter is more than a few pages long). But this approach involves dozens of characters, many of them peripheral to the central storyline, and the result reads like a faulty mash-up: plenty of bits and pieces (often well rendered by Lotz), but they don’t coalesce into a real narrative with the kind of momentum or urgency that the premise calls for. Agent: Oli Munson, A.M. Heath & Company.

May 1, 2014
Lone survivors from different plane crashes spark apocalyptic fears.South African screenwriter Lotz's new thriller revolves around the fictitious events of "Black Thursday," Jan. 12, 2012, when four planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. As if that weren't frightening enough, the drama is intensified when the public learns about the cryptic last message of a woman who died on one of the planes and the odd coincidence that in three of the crashes, a single child survived. When the children are returned to their families, they seem different somehow, and they become the focus of rumors ranging from alien activity to paranormal messaging. In the U.S., the hysteria is brought to a head by a fundamentalist preacher who sees the children as the harbingers of the End Times referenced in the book of Revelation. While the media hounds the survivors' families, politicians exploit the public's apocalyptic fears to take domestic and foreign policy in a new direction. Lotz tells the story through a fabricated nonfiction book within the novel called Black Thursday: From Crash to Conspiracy: Inside the Phenomenon of The Three, written by the fictional Elspeth Martins, who says she's pieced together an amalgam of email messages, interviews, articles, online chat forums and memoirs. This eclectic style of storytelling provides just enough information to follow the developing events, while the reader grasps for the crucial information that will solve the mystery of the enigmatic children.An engaging thriller with clues that will keep you guessing.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 1, 2014

Lotz, a South African screenwriter and novelist, unspools a creepy thriller about four simultaneous plane crashes that stun the world. At three of the crash sites, a lone child survivor is found. And at one site, a fatally wounded passenger records an ominous message on her cell phone just before she dies. Told through a series of interviews conducted by a journalist investigating "Black Thursday," as the crash date comes to be known, we quickly discover that the three survivors are different children from who they were before the accidents. Are they merely traumatized? Are their families and caretakers imagining things? Or, as some fervently believe, are they harbingers of death and a sign that the apocalypse is near? VERDICT Lotz is an excellent storyteller, and she favors subtle innuendo over big shocks. Her unsettling tale builds to a crescendo that will have readers leaving the lights on long after they finish the book. Recommended for fans of sf and apocalyptic thrillers by authors such as Justin Cronin and Stephen King. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2014
Around the world, at almost the same time, four passenger airplanes plummet to the earth. There are no survivors, apart from three children (on three separate planes) and a woman who soon dies but not before leaving a recorded message that warns listeners to watch the dead people. The young survivors, soon dubbed The Three by the press, become worldwide sensations, even as some begin to suspect something is not quite right about them. Theories about The Three start to spread: they're harbingers of doom, says one theory, the embodiments of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; no, says another, they were chosen for survival by our reptilian alien overlords. As it turns out, no one has any real notion of just how important and dangerous these children really are. The author's use of the oral-history format, with its shifting voices and points of view, is a stroke of genius: the reader is in a state of near-constant confusion at the beginning, which is slowly replaced by unease and then dread as the various commentators start to see the bigger picture. A very creepy, very effective novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)