Before the Fall

Genre: Fiction

I gave this book **

This is the story of an airplane crash, what caused the crash and what happens to the survivors and the victims. Scott Burgess, an artist and resident of Martha’s Vineyard boards the private jet of millionaires Maggie and David and their children Rachel (9) and JJ (4). They are joined by friends, Sarah and Ben Kipling (also millionaires), pilot, James Melody, co-pilot, Charlie Bush, Emma Lightner the stewardess and bodyguard, Gil Baruch. We later meet Eleanor, Maggie’s sister and Doug, her husband. The plane goes down soon after take-off and we follow Scott as he heroically saves little JJ. We learn that Scott, a former competitive swimmer, is an unsuccessful artist who was on his way to New York to meet with a gallery owner about an art show. We learn that Maggie and David’s wealth is very large and that their family is followed by a private security guard, Gil. We learn that Sarah and Ben have one college-aged daughter and that Ben is being investigated by the FBI. We learn that James, the pilot, has a strained relationship with his mother and we learn that his co-pilot, Charlie, a last-minute replacement, is a playboy who has a relationship of sorts with Emma. We learn that Emma’s father was an air force pilot. And finally, we learn that Gil is a former Israeli soldier who comes from a well-known Israeli family. We learn a lot about each of these characters, but most of what we learn is unnecessary in the telling of this story.This story reminds me of a piano in need of a tuning. All the keys are there, the beautiful wooden box to hold them is there, even the nice bench to sit and play the piano is there, but, still, the piano just doesn’t sound right! This story has all the right ingredients: [some] good characters, an interesting plot and the oh-so-trendy story line told from different points of view. However, put together, none of these read right. I would say the main problem is that this book is billed as a mystery, but there really isn’t anything super mysterious in the plot. The cause of the crash (I won’t give it away here) is predictable. I think this would have been much more successful as a character driven story. I played a lot of “What-Ifs” while reading this book. As in, “What if instead of the plot focusing on what happened to make the plane crash, the plot focused on what happens to JJ after the crash?” Or, “What if, Eleanor spent all of JJ’s inheritance and he finds out about it as an adult?” The good thing about this book is that the idea is there, but it should have been spun differently. Overall, I would say I didn’t enjoy this as I felt it didn’t read like a book, but more like a draft that needs a lot of editing and massaging.