CRASHERS

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.