WORST CASE SCENARIO

One disaster triggers another in a cascade of perils.

A commercial pilot suffers a widow-maker heart attack at 35,000 feet over Minnesota with almost 300 passengers and crew aboard. The copilot is trapped in the lavatory. A flight attendant struggles hopelessly with the controls as the jet noses downward. There will be no miracles. The first two chapters of Newman's latest are the most frightening imaginable, with everything that could possibly go wrong going wrong. The plane clips a power line and shatters, with the largest piece hitting the Clover Hill nuclear power plant. The impact cracks a wall in a building containing water that cools spent fuel rods. If those rods overheat, radiation flowing into the adjacent Mississippi could turn the river basin into a dead zone all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Primary electrical distribution is severed. Debris blocks roads. A flaming wing crushes a family’s car. The novel is aptly named but for the lack of a plural: This string of worst-case scenarios is expertly designed to scare the bejesus out of us. And yet it all seems plausible. Luckily, there are heroes, but the reader had best not get emotionally invested in all of them, as they pay a heavy price. Meanwhile, the pool is losing water that could cause a fuel rod fire and an “uncontrollable spread of invisible, toxic, cancer-causing particulates” that would be “in everything we touched, ate, drank, and breathed, for…for forever.” The accident may have massive global implications, and the clock is ticking. “Nuclear waste is toxic for millennia,” a scientist warns the U.S. president. So brace yourselves, readers. This one is frightening.

A chilling tale of disaster, bravery, and sacrifice.