First Light

September 19, 2016
Rancic, a winner of The Apprentice and bestselling author of motivational business books (You’re Hired), fails to transfer his charisma to fiction with a standard-issue disaster story. A plane crashes in Alaska, trapping a team of coworkers at an oil company. Crisis manager Daniel Albrecht treks from the site of the crash to find help for the survivors, including his injured, pregnant fiancée, Kerry Egan, leaving her in the care of his coworker Phil Velez and a kind and competent nurse. Paul opens up to Kerry about his grief over the death of his wife, but he keeps his crush on Kerry to himself. Awkward framing, in which the story is told via the memory of two survivors, is designed to tease but not telegraph the book’s secret plot twist, but it’s too transparent and makes the narrative portions told from other characters’ perspective confusing. Rancic’s dialogue-heavy prose feels right for a TV or movie script, but the characters’ feelings of fear and grief are underexplored. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment.