Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

Continuing my streak of entertaining pleasure reads, an hour after I put down Amy Stewart’s latest mystery, I picked up Noah Hawley’s fifth novel, Before the Fall.  Before the Fall is a little bit of a genre stretch for me. I put it on hold when it was first published, and was just walking out of the library when I ran into a patron who has a similar reading list.  She just returned it, said she could not put it down,  and was anxious to chat when I finished. Her feedback shifted Before the Fall to the top of my to be read pile.

The story:  a private plane is flying from Martha’s Vineyard to Manhattan carrying the Batemans (a media mogul, his much younger wife and two children), the Kiplings (a powerful Wall Street broker and his wife),  and Scott Burroughs, a painter about to make his comeback.  The plane crashes shortly after take off, and Burroughs and the Bateman’s four-year-old son are the only survivors.  Before the Fall is the story of the investigation and the aftermath, well told from a variety of points of view.

I can’t say anything else about the plot.  You will want to unfold each layer, let it build upon itself, predict and guess at the outcomes.  What I can say is I was held captive by this novel.  (My husband had to cook.)  Yes, I wanted to know why the plane went down.  It reminded me of watching the news after JFK Jr.’s plane disappeared.  The why doesn’t change the outcome, but is not something one can easily set aside.  As I am turning pages and wondering, the details of the characters-the back story that may or may not become pertinent-has me engaged to the point of being willing to believe a couple of different scenarios.  Is the scenario Hawley chose the best?  Does it do justice to the crash and the people he has laid out for us readers?  You will have to decide.