Breaking Point

September 12, 2011
In Haynes’s lackluster second thriller featuring pathologist Leonard Tomzak (after 2010’s Crashers), Tomzak, a veteran crash investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, is flying on a commercial prop plane from Washington, D.C., to Seattle when a shadowy assassin known as Calendar uses a new weapon to short out all the aircraft’s electronics as it’s flying low over a Montana forest. Tomzak is one of the few survivors in the ensuing crash. Calendar resorts to further violence in taking care of loose ends in the crash’s aftermath. Meanwhile, Tomzak’s colleagues try to figure out what happened. Haynes undercuts the suspense by revealing the culprit and his motives early on, and the frequent action sequences suggest that, unlike Michael Crichton in Airframe, the author wasn’t confident enough that he could sustain interest with just the post-crash forensics. Uneven prose (“Tommy... worked really hard not to show two emotions: A: I’m about to pass out, and B: that peashooter ain’t loaded”) doesn’t help.

October 1, 2011
Two "crashers"—airplane disaster investigators—who survive the downing of a 65-seat twin turboprop plane in Montana become part of the intensive effort to penetrate the dark secrecy surrounding the incident—and nab the cold-blooded, technologically advanced perpetrators of the crash. Haynes follows up his well-received, similarly themed debut, Crashers (2010), with a measured thriller involving controversial, internationally banned weapons technology that mercenaries will stop at nothing to acquire. Pathologist Tommy Tomzak and sound engineer Kiki Duvall, a romantically involved couple with the National Transportation Safety Board, are on their way to a conference when their plane plummets into a wooded area, killing most of people on board, including a close associate. The prime target was Andrew Malatesta, dashing designer of the weapons technology, about which he has had a change of heart. Calendar is the ruthless "cleaner" assigned the task of preventing Malatesta from blowing the whistle, and destroying all evidence of the plot to bring down the plane. Jumping back and forth on an international canvas stretching from Spain to Mexico to Twin Pines, Mont., Haynes weaves a web-like narrative involving Homeland Security and the FAA, defense contractors and the CIA, and a cast of characters including former Israeli agent Daria Gibron, Mexican arms dealer Carlos "the War Dog" Ramos and Washington Post reporter Amy Dreyfus. The author is in complete command of his material, sharing his expertise with keen understatement. This is not one of those books in which the author sets out to impress us with how much he knows. It takes a while for the book to turn up the suspense, and some of the characters get lost in the shuffle, but it's an enjoyable, well-crafted thriller nonetheless.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from November 1, 2011
In the sequel to Crashers (2010), Haynes delivers another nonstop thriller featuring National Transportation Safety Board personnel, known as crashers, as they uncover a deadly plot. When brilliant engineer and entrepreneur Andrew Malatesta discovers that a military contractor has stolen the design for his prototype electromagnetic pulse weapon and has plans to produce it in violation of an international treaty, he plans to go public but is killed before he can by his own weapon, used against him to bring down the airliner on which he's a passenger, along with three NTSB crashers. As a routine NTSB investigation of the incident is repeatedly sabotaged, NTSB crash survivors pathologist Dr. Tommy Tomzak and voice analyst expert Kiki Duvall (aka the Sonar Witch) team up with FBI agent Ray Calabrese to do their own undercover investigation. The three find themselves pitted against black-ops experts with a skewed view of patriotism, including a sociopathic contract killer code-named Calendar. Warnings of the power and reach of the military-industrial complex echo as action accelerates to include multiple plane crashes, threatening forest fires, and a variety of homicides. A top-notch, tension-packed technothriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)