Two new suspense novels involving plane hijackings, and with remarkably similar premises are
- Clare Mackintosh's Hostage, narrated by Vinette Robinson
- T.J. Newman's Falling, narrated by Steven Weber
In both, a member of the flight crew is forced to choose between family and passengers--family members are being threatened and held hostage on the ground, there's at least one unknown mole on the plane, and the crew member is being directed to jeopardize the planeload of innocent passengers (in
Hostage a flight attendant is being directed to open the door to the flight deck so a hijacker can crash the plane; in
Falling the pilot is being directed to crash the plane).
Mackintosh is one of my favorite suspense authors, and I give her the edge--she seemed to deal more with the anguish of the moral choice presented to her flight attendant protagonist. It was also easier to see how one could make the moral compromise to simply open a door to save her family and pretend that the action could be divorced from its consequences. Some of it was predictable--said flight attendant had once begun training to be a commercial pilot. Hmm, like that wasn't going to matter, right?
Newman's protagonist had a much starker choice--he was being told to kill himself, his passengers, and people on the ground, and from the start he said he would not do it. The story had a lot more action, both in the plane (flight crew machinations) and on the ground (attempts to rescue the family, evacuate the crash target, etc.). Some of it got pretty melodramatic and corny. I kept thinking of
Airport and the disaster movies of that era.