Crashers

I bought this with my earned points as a free book because the plot description seemed interesting. I was not disappointed! Very good and one I didn't want to put down. That phrase might be cliche...but in this case it's so true. I read alot, as most of us do, and it's the best book I've read this year.

I was quite impressed with this book. Good plot development. Many of the characters were well developed and believable. (My gosh, some were so very familiar, with their narrow-minded bureaucratic minds...I've worked in government before). The technical aspects were interesting, fleshed out well, and intelligible. Haynes has good command of the language and a keen ability to keep a story line going. Great literature? Well, no. A great book, a fun read, extremely informative? Yes. Very much so. I put the book on my wife's night stand with a recommendation..."This is smart writing. It doesn't insult you. I think you'd enjoy it and learn something from it." And she really doesn't care that much for thrillers. But she does like solid writing and Haynes certainly displays that. If this is Haynes first book then I say "congratulations!" to Dana Hanyes and I anticipate great things from him in the future. Indeed, I eagerly await his next book. This guy is talented.

A good thriller is one that keeps you anticipating the outcome up until the very last page; it's one where you don't know who will live or die, and who the bad guy is until the author tells you. Dana Haynes' first thriller is one of the good ones. The only problem I have with it is that I'm done reading. Crashers is about a group of investigators with the NTSB who are in charge of discovering why a plane has crashed every time one goes down. Fresh from quitting the group after an eighteen month investigation failed to find a solution, Tommy Tomzak is thrust into the lead when he's the first person with experience to make it to a devastating plane crash in Oregon. Fearing this new crash will turn into another unsolvable mystery, Tommy is reluctant to take the lead. Things get worse for him when clues start to pop up that this plane crash may not have been an accident. Crashers is the great kind of thriller where we read from both sides of the coin; we know the plane was taken down by a geek with a laser and a laptop, but we don't know who helped him or what his endgame is. We bite our nails as Tommy and the NTSB "crashers" try to investigate the cause of the crash, waiting for them to see what we see, to discover the bits and pieces we know. This is not to say Crashers doesn't leave anything to mystery, because it certainly does; Haynes' gives us just enough to keep us craving more. A great page-turner, an intense edge-of-your-seat thriller, that is Crashers. Haynes' writing is so visual I could see everything in my mind. The best part is that I just read he's working on a sequel!

Dana Haynes has had some extensive experience in the world of writing, not only as a newspaper journalist but also as the author (under the name Conrad Haynes) of traditional mysteries. The Portland, Oregon native, who does double occupational duty as the Manager of Public Affairs for Portland Community College, has now turned his considerable literary skills to the thriller genre. CRASHERS is a sterling example of how the job of thriller writing is truly and properly executed. If CRASHERS came with an instruction manual, the first step would be this: open mouth, insert heart. I never really knew what that term meant until I read the opening pages, wherein a commercial jetliner experiences a catastrophic engine failure over Oregon to disastrous effect, lessened somewhat by the heroic, if ultimately futile, efforts of the flight crew. The remainder of the book then proceeds along two plotlines. One concerns the dastardly act that caused the plane to crash and the lead-up to what is intended to be an even more disastrous event. The other is the painstaking investigation into what caused the initial crash. This introduces an unusual team headed up, albeit reluctantly, by Dr. Leonard "Tommy" Tomzak. A former employee of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the highly-regarded Tomzak had resigned from the agency following a crash investigation that went wrong. Though initially an unwilling participant in the investigation of the Oregon crash, Tomzak soon demonstrates his expertise not only in preserving the crash site but also in connecting a seemingly endless and random series of evidentiary dots. Dennis Silverman, the evil but brilliant engineer who caused the crash to occur, has inserted himself into the investigation, practically at Tomzak's shoulder. For Silverman, the incident is merely a demonstration of his genius for a group of terrorists who have a target of even greater significance in mind. When the FBI gets wind of a possible connection, a race against time begins with the future of at least two nations at stake. Meanwhile, a beautiful woman named Daria Gibron has managed, in a daring but maverick move, to infiltrate the terrorist cell. Gibron, an ex-Mossad agent, may be the last best hope of the FBI to prevent a tragedy that seems almost certain to take place. As a violent vignette is played out against the backdrop of a California desert, a disparate group of smart and dangerous characters move at cross purposes to either carry out or protect against a dastardly plot to change the world as we know it. CRASHERS is a big book that moves like a rocket from the start. Think of it as a gallon of ice water waiting for you at the end of a hot and humid summer day: you won't be able to take it in quickly enough. Haynes takes one disaster and another in the making, puts a quietly likable hero and a lovably dangerous secret agent in their path, adds a poisonous viper (or two) lurking quietly in the woodbox, and just for screams a

Crashers is the fascinating story of a "go" team from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that sets out to determine the cause of an airplane crash. Based on fact, this is a novel of suspense that is deeply interesting and I learned a lot about the way that crashes are investigated. Author Dana Haynes is very good at creating believable characters. I especially appreciated the strong women in the book, such as Kiki, who is a sound analyst, and Daria, a former Mossad agent. These are women who contribute to the team effort on an equal footing with men, rather than helpless heroines who end up needing to be saved by the guys. Unlike many page turners, this novel is very well written and despite the serious subject matter, it is quite funny in parts. Take this exchange, for instance: Susan, the NTSB team leader, is holding a press conference. She remarks, "I don't know how many of you know this, but we tend to think of Arthur Conan Doyle as the patron saint of NTSB. We're guided by his famous dictum, 'When the impossible has been ruled out, whatever remains, no matter how impossible, must be the truth.'" The book goes on, "As the press conference was breaking up, the devastatingly handsome anchorman for one of the local network affiliates walked up and flashed Susan his thermodynamic TV smile. 'Hi, quick question?' Susan smiled politely. 'We're always looking for experts who can appear on our newscast, to lend a little authenticity to the reports.' 'Yes?' said Susan. He flipped open a notepad. 'How do we contact this Arthur Doyle guy?'"

As "Crashers" opens, an experienced pilot named Meghan Danvers prepares to take off from Portland International Airport in a Vermeer 111 with one hundred and forty-six people on board. She and her copilot, Russ Kazmanski, work well together and they are anticipating a pleasurable trip. CascadeAir Flight 818 takes off uneventfully in perfect weather, but a short while later, all hell breaks loose. For no apparent reason, the jet starts rolling and bucking. Meghan and Russ dump fuel and try to make it back to the runway in Portland. "Something deep inside the plane snapped," and "the starboard wing began ripping away from the body." "The ship rolled, pivoted, [and] began its death dive." Responding to the tragedy are more than one hundred people, among them the "Go-Team" of the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), known colloquially as the Crashers. The Investigator-In-Charge is a pathologist named Dr. Leonard (Tommy) Tomzak, a maverick who is no longer an official member of the NTSB. He resigned in disgrace after failing to complete his last assignment satisfactorily, but he happens to be in Portland for a medical conference. Tommy rushes to the downed jetliner and masterfully choreographs the rescue and recovery efforts while the rest of the team hurries to Oregon from such places as Connecticut, San Francisco, and Florida. After state troopers, fire trucks, and ambulances arrive, Tommy makes sure that the wounded are cared for promptly, and that the scene is kept pristine for the investigation to come. "Crashers" is a humdinger of an action-adventure novel that puts the reader in the field with the men and women of the Go-Team. We learn a great deal about how such people as Peter Kim and Walter Mulroney, both engineers, Isaiah Gray a former air force pilot, Kathryn (Kiki) Duvall a "sonar witch" who is an expert at deciphering the cockpit voice recorder, and John Roby, an explosives and fire expert, pool their resources to figure out how and why this airliner fell from the sky. The author, Dana Haynes, literally goes into the nuts and bolts of avionics and aeronautics, and even those of us who know little about such topics cannot help but be fascinated by the time, expense, and effort that the NTSB expends to find out exactly what went wrong and how it can be prevented from happening again. Naturally, even experts have a tendency to quarrel and disagree, and when the FBI also gets involved, matters become even more complicated. The investigators are mystified at first. Did the Vermeer crash because of pilot error, mechanical failure, or something else entirely? Adding further juice to this electrifying story is a subplot about a small but determined band of terrorists, a brilliant and malevolent techno-geek, and a beautiful former spy who risks her life to thwart a nefarious scheme. Lovers of hardware and violence will be in hog heaven. There are guns galore, hand-to-hand combat, romance, betrayal, and an explosive f