Set in Britain, the United States and aboard the International Space Station, this month’s thrillers have one thing in common: governments acting against the interests of their own citizens.
Departure 37
by Scott Carson
In Carson’s rollicking DEPARTURE 37 (Emily Bestler Books, 389 pp., $28.99), hundreds of American pilots summarily refuse to fly their planes after receiving odd phone calls from their (dead, in some cases) mothers. In response, a government operative telephones her handlers. “Seeker Script is operational,” she announces.
It’s a mere amuse-bouche in a book that’s part Cold War thriller, part “Twilight Zone” episode and part Stephen King-like yarn about regular people in extraordinary circumstances. It toggles between the Cuban missile crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war, and the present day, when an old weather balloon carrying a cryptic message and a battered wristwatch suddenly appears in a sparsely inhabited corner of Maine.
This is the fourth book for Carson, the pseudonym used by the best-selling author Michael Koryta for his supernaturally tinged work. It requires a bit of patience as it delves into its characters’ back stories, but Carson’s deep interest in the post-World War II nuclear program might send you down some rabbit holes of your own.
Key to the work — the fictional part of it, that is — is Dr. Martin Hazelton, a brilliant 1960s physicist studying how to protect planes in flight from the fallout of nuclear bombs below. He has an ingenious solution, though the country (and the readers) won’t know what it is until evidence of it comes hurtling into view, some 60 years later.
The post Thrillers With Twists You Won’t See Coming appeared first on New York Times.
