My Reading Nook

I was first introduced to John Corey and his wife, Kate Mayfield in Wildfire a novel about a group of home-grown terrorists who plot to set off a nuclear bomb. Since John and Kate are part of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force, it stands to reason that they encounter terrorists in many different forms.

John Corey is a former NYPD homicide detective and Kate is an FBI agent. John harldy ever goes by the book where Kate almost always does. Night Fall has Kate straying from her “by the book” path and involving John in a search for the truth about TWA Flight 800.

TWA Flight 800 if you don’t remember, was a Boeing 747 bound for Paris with 230 passengers and crew on board that exploded off the Atlantic coast of Long Island in July of 1996.

Many theories about what happened to the ill fated aircraft have abounded from it being shot down by “friendly fire” from one of the Navy vessels in the area that were performing war games to the final decision by the CIA and FBI to call it a tragic accidental explosion triggered by a vapor build up in a fuel tank and an short in an electrical system.

Five years after the tragic event, mourners still gather on the beach close to where the plane went down to mourn those lost. Kate, who worked the case in its early days still harbors a feeling that something was missed; something that would give a better answer that would tie all the conflicting statements of the more than 200 eyewitnesses together and answer the mysterious question of “where did the flash of light that preceeded the explosion come from?”

Rumor has it that there was a couple on the beach who video taped the explosion, but no tape has been turned in by any citizens and all attempts to find the couple have dead ended.  But that’s before John Corey’s powers of dogged detective work are turned loose on the case.

He not only uncovers the missing couple, but the conspiracy to hide the truth from the American public only to have it all literally go up in flames as yet another terrorist attack occurs on American soil.

This was an exciting don’t-put-it-down book from start to finish. You are enticed into the mind games played by the agencies involved in the FATTF and their often conflicting goals. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but trust me, you’ll be saying “ohmygod!”

Night Fall by Nelson Demille
Published by Warner Books 2004
ISBN: 0-446-57663-8