DEPARTURE

Survivors of an unusual plane crash race to understand a strange new world.

Harper Lane has a big decision to make when her flight from New York lands in London. Except it doesn’t. It crashes—and that’s just the beginning of the surviving passengers’ troubles. Even though Nick Stone, another passenger, immediately takes charge of the situation and organizes a rescue operation to get people out of the tail section of the plane, plenty of troubling unanswered questions remain. Such as, why is it that no rescue personnel have showed up, nobody’s cellphone works, and most importantly, where exactly are they? Propelled by these mysteries, and plenty of action, the opening chapters of this novel gallop along. Unfortunately, the answers to all these questions don’t quite fulfill the promise of the strong opening. Once Harper and Nick start to figure out where they’ve landed, with help from the no-nonsense doctor Sabrina Schröder and Yul Tan, who won’t stop working on his laptop even in a broken-apart plane, the narrative starts to get bogged down in lengthy explanations, and the characters stop feeling like living, breathing people and start feeling like devices for advancing the plot. The novel wants to raise good questions about how our decisions shape our futures, but the conspiracies and counterconspiracies our heroes find themselves embroiled in simply don’t ring true.

This sci-fi mystery starts strong, but the tangled plot that follows ultimately fails to satisfy.