Crashers

April 5, 2010
Haynes's compelling first thriller takes familiar elements—a mysterious airplane crash, a bent FBI agent, a deadly female spy—and mixes them with the world of National Transportation Safety Board aviation disaster investigations. When pathologist Leonard “Tommy” Tomzak, who's attending a Portland, Ore., medical conference, sees a TV report of a nearby jetliner crash, he rushes to the site via helicopter. There Tommy takes charge of the investigation, though he quit the NTSB a few months earlier in a huff. As other NTSB personnel (known as “crashers”) make their way to the crash scene from around the country, Tommy and his local crew secure the site. The forensic details fascinate but aren't for the weak of stomach. Haynes (Sacrifice Play
and two other mysteries as Conrad Haynes) nicely integrates several subplots involving terrorism. The slam-bang crash landing of a conclusion will leave readers anxiously awaiting the promised sequel. 100,000 first printing.

June 15, 2010

A National Transportation Safety Board "Go-Team" races to figure out what brought an airliner down in Haynes's debut thriller.

Pathologist and former NTSB investigator Leonard "Tommy" Tomzak happened to be in Portland for a conference when news of a nearby plane crash broke. Tommy had recently left the NTSB in shame after his protracted investigation of a crash in Kentucky went nowhere. All the same, Tommy heads to the crash site to babysit the scene until the investigators—the "Go Team"—can assemble. At the insistence of Susan Tanaka, an NTSB senior incident investigator who thought the Kentucky crash was unsolvable, Tommy reluctantly takes the job of Investigator in Charge. As the rest of the team arrives—including cocky, well-dressed engine specialist Peter Kim, athletic, quirky audio expert Kiki Duvall, and John Roby, the wisecracking English bomb specialist—some members are thrilled to be working under Tommy, while others don't think he should be anywhere near a crash investigation, let alone in charge of one. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Daria Gibron, a former Mossad agent who now does occasional work for the FBI, almost accidentally infiltrates a group of fanatical Ulster Loyalists who seem to have had something to do with the crash. She realizes that the terrorists are planning an even bigger follow-up, but she can't get away long enough to send a warning to her minder in the bureau. So the Go Team is working against the clock even more than they realize. To make matters worse, the man who engineered the disaster happens to be one of their own—an awkward software engineer working for the company that made the so-called "black box," who surreptitiously wrote code into his company's data recorders that allows him to drop planes out of the sky practically at will. This is a thriller that lands a rare and satisfying hat trick: The action sequences hit hard, the characters are idiosyncratic while still feeling like real people, and the "snappy" dialogue actually snaps.

The character-driven, behind-the-scenes investigative drama of a particularly good plane-themed episode of CSI, coupled with the beats, timing and grand-scale action of a summer blockbuster.

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Starred review from April 1, 2010
A large passenger plane crashes outside of Portland, OR, with very few survivors, and the investigation begins almost immediately. Former National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) pathologist Dr. Leonard Tomzak happens to be close by the crash site and takes command at once of "The Crashers" team as the search for the truth begins. Simultaneously, the FBI starts to suspect that the plane was brought down by terrorists. All too soon, they realize that the terrorists will strike again]in three days. As Tomzak takes control of his team, he has to fight jealousies, turf wars, and his own feelings of inadequacy. VERDICT The plane crash scenes are extremely graphic but absolutely essential to the reader's understanding of the aftermath of a plane downed by a terrorist strike. Although the ending is just a little over the top, this thriller debut is filled with excitement and knowledge of NTSB procedures and problems. Highly recommendedjust don't eat during the crash-scene investigation. [Library marketing; 100,000-copy first printing.]Robert Conroy, Warren, MI

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2010
Action-oriented readers will embrace this new thriller for its lively and fast-moving story, even as they may find the many familiar elements a little tiresome. The premise is simple: a crack team of National Transportation Safety Board experts investigate airplane crashes. Normally they take months to sift through wreckage and evidence, but this time they have mere days: if they cant figure out what and who brought down CascadeAir Flight 818, more planes will fall from the sky. The lead characters, the Crashers, are cut from familiar molds: the hotshot engineer, the voice-recorder specialist, the veteran pathologist, and so on. They seem clearly designed as anchors for a series, but they need more fleshing out to make the transition from types to fully developed characters. The plot itself relies on familar assembly-cast TV crime dramas, but it is well paced and generates plenty of tension. A solid debut that, with some fine-tuning, could become an engaging series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)