Before the fall by Noah Hawley
Published: May 31 2016 by Grand Central Publishing 
Genre: Fiction/mystery/thriller/suspense
Pages: 391

Literary awards: Edgar Award for Best Novel (2017) Goodreads Choice award for Mystery & Thriller (2016)

One foggy evening a private plane takes off from Martha’s Vineyard headed for New York. There are 11 souls aboard the plane, a pilot, a co-pilot, a flight attendant, a wealthy family of four, a security guard, a VIP and his wife, and a painter. Sixteen minutes later the plane crashes to the sea and miraculously two people survive – the painter and a 4 year old boy.

The mystery or suspense lies in what really happened to the plane. The story travels back and forth in time, in the viewpoints of all the different characters.

I don’t know about you, but I always read very carefully the articles regarding plane crashes. I read about the people on board and the reasons behind the crash. Flying to me is such a miraculous privilege. At the same time you put your life in the hands of a crew and should anything happen to make the plane go down, you have no control and none on board is discriminated. Everyone turns equal.

So why do planes crash? Sabotage? Technical errors? Human errors? Terrorism? Birds?

Noah Hawley is an Emmy, Golden Globe, PEN, Critic’s Choice, and Peabody Awardwinning author, screenwriter and producer. He’s written for Bones and Fargo which are two of my favorite shows and Before the fall is his fifth novel. That being said, there is no doubt here that Mr.Hawley is a gifted in both writing and being creative.

The book is very clever in how it explores all different options and is driven in directions by the press, which, lets be hones, it also does in real life. However, for a book, there was simply too much dialogue for me. I’m not saying that the dialogue was bad, the dialogue was excellent! There was just too much of it. And I think that’s the curse of being an excellent script writer, the divide between script and book.

This isn’t a book a would recommend to everyone, but to a selected audience, I think it really hits the mark. For me, it was just so so.