Book Review: CRASHERS by Dana Haynes
“Crashers” is the informal name given to the team of investigators assembled in the aftermath of a plane crash. Their job is to determine what caused the crash, and it’s a job that can take months. When a passenger plane goes down outside Portland, Oregon, the team, led by pathologist Dr. Leonard “Tommy” Tomzak initially believe it was an accident. But something doesn’t add up. And as the pieces of the puzzle come together, they find something more sinister is going on. This downed plane was just a dry-run–a “proof of concept”–for a much bigger operation. And the team have only a matter of days to figure out how the plane was crashed, and by whom.
This was Dana Haynes first novel. Dana was a journalist for twenty years so, I presume, no stranger to research. And it shows. Dana includes a lot of detail about the workings of the aircraft, which lends an air of authenticity to his NTSB investigators as they pull apart the passenger plane to find out what went wrong. Much of the first part of the novel is taken up with the investigation of the initial crash, though there are sub-plots as we meet the bad guys and the FBI players involved in the story to keep things moving along. And in the midst of the investigation, we get to know the characters. Dana has assembled an interesting mix of people for this story. Dr. Tomzak is a Texan, and supposedly resigned from the NTSB after the last Crasher team he led failed to find the cause of the crash. There’s Kiki Duvall, a voice recorder specialist with a finely tuned ear, and an eye for Tommy. John Roby is a bomb expert from Manchester, England. Walter Mulroney who knows his way around airplane parts, and Isaiah Grey who’s a dab hand at flying them. Peter Kim is their engineer, and Susan Tanaka is the intergovernmental liason and the one responsible for pulling this team together.
I really enjoyed this novel. The pace was a little slow to begin with, which was a good thing since it gave me a chance to warm to the characters and get a basic understanding of the challenges faced by the team as they try to determine cause. As I said, there were some sub-plots that kept the story from turning into an engineering manual. In those sub-plots we meet former Israeli intelligence agent Daria Gibron. She had helped the FBI in the past, and is anxious to be of use again. This time, the feds are on the heels of a group of men connected to a terrorist organization. Daria’s minder, Ray Calabrese, warns her away but she won’t be told. She pursues her own line of inquiry, which ends up putting her in mortal danger.
The latter third of the novel really starts to pick up the pace as the plot strands come together, and the urgency of the situation becomes apparent for both the Crashers and the bad guys. The closer I got to the end, the less I wanted to stop reading. In fact, it seems Dana was so sure his readers would keep going that he started chapter 50 with a pronoun, assuming you’ll remember which character is in play from the end of chapter 49!
I do have a couple of minor issues with the story. First, in a section written from the third-person point of view of one of the bad guys, he outlines exactly how the passenger plane was brought down. This felt a little clunky to me, especially since the Crasher team figure it out in the end (oops–spoiler! Not really. You probably guessed they would figure it out). I’m not sure why this part is there. Maybe the editor felt Dana needed to explain it succinctly so the readers could understand. I thought it was unnecessary. Second, Dana tries to make John Roby sound English by using a selection of phrases that are particularly Brit-sounding (“cheers,” “innit,” etc.). Perhaps he based this off of genuine Mancunians he knows. To me it sounded a bit Dick-Van-Dyke-in-Mary-Poppins. It didn’t ring true to my Brit ears. Especially when he uses “cheers” as a greeting, as in “hello.” I know a number of Americans who seem to think “cheers” is another way Brits use to say “hello.” Never in all my days in the UK, and as a native British English speaker would I ever have used “cheers” in that way. “Cheers” means “thank you.” My Dad used it a lot. If he ever used it at the end of a conversation, or when waving someone goodbye, it was because that person had helped him in some way.
Those points aside, I’d rate this four-out-of-five stars, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good thriller. The voice is multiple close third-person, switching between characters as necessary. That can be hard to do without confusing the reader, but that wasn’t an issue here. There is profane language, and some minor sexual situations, but I’d say the thing that R-rates it for me is the violence. Dana describes in some detail injuries sustained by crash victims (remember, the lead investigator is a pathologist), which can be a little nasty at times.
Dana comes back to the Crashers in subsequent novels, and he’s written some Daria Gibron stories, too. They’re on my TBR list for sure.
