Departure 37
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“If you loved The Twilight Zone, this is for you. It's a mind-blower.” —Stephen King
Forgotten Cold War mysteries make a terrifying reappearance in this “totally unique and utterly enthralling” (Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author) thriller.
Attention, passengers—Flight 37 to nowhere is now boarding.
On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was not planned.
While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her new home—a place she loathes. All she wants is to escape back to Brooklyn. She’s about to get much more than that.
Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. Experimentation with it was in process when the pressure of the Cold War forced his hand, and his discovery became literally ahead of its time. Now, decades later, its dark potential has come full circle and every second is the enemy. With the future in her hands, only Claire can stop what’s coming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this striking thriller, Carson (Lost Man's Lane)—a pseudonym for crime novelist Michael Koryta—nimbly entwines a contemporary coming-of-age story with a tale of Cold War paranoia. Charlie Goodwin, 17 and half-orphaned, has relocated from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Ash Point, Maine, so her father can chase his dream of opening a brewery. There's not much to the town, save for the long-abandoned naval air station and the wreckage of the B-52 bomber Charlie's grandfather crashed into the side of a mountain in 1962. One morning, from the cockpit of that wreck, Charlie hears her dead mother's voice over the radio, warning her not to fly that day, though she had no plans to do so. Across the country, hundreds of pilots receive similar messages from their own mothers, living and dead. The calls come from an AI program designed to clear the skies, triggered when a satellite detects the reappearance of a B-52 that mysteriously vanished mid-flight on a mission to drop a hydrogen bomb on Cuba to bring an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Charlie's story unfolds over a single tense afternoon, flashbacks chronicle Dr. Martin "Marty" Hazleton's efforts to find a method to shield airplanes from nuclear fallout. With copious cliffhangers, an original premise, and a resonant emotional center, this builds on Carson's previous success. It's a winner.
