Published by Grand Central Publishing
Publication date: June 6th 2017
Just in time for vacation reading! Noah Hawley’s suspenseful mystery is being released in paperback- which is even better because it makes for easier transport to the beach/pool/porch/hammock/wherever you get to hang out and read in the summer.
True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected, but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day, a thing we take for granted as normal—a child’s bedroom—and transform it into something sinister, untrustworthy—is to undermine the very fabric of life.
A private plane goes down in the Atlantic between Martha’s Vineyard and NYC with the billionaire owner of a news-as-entertainment network, an about-to-be-indicted banker who launders money for Syria, North Korea and Libya, their families, an Israeli security guard and a recovering alcoholic painter. And that is all you need to know about Noah Hawley’s new thriller Before the Fall. All right, the painter and the billionaire’s four-year-old son are the only two survivors of the crash.
In short order, Hawley begins to peel back the layers of every character in Before the Fall, building the tension with unsavory pasts, personal issues and mysterious backgrounds. Hawley then adds a voracious media with a 24/7 news cycle fronted by a lard-ass bully who trades in gossip, innuendo, lies and conjecture as opposed to facts and the truth and ratchets the can’t-put-down factor to Mach 10.
Before the Fall is getting a lot of buzz from readers and bloggers alike and it deserves it for no other reason than everyone has a very different take on many of the novel’s components. For me, this is an action thriller and if the ending felt weak in comparison to the ferocity of the rest of the novel, I’m willing to concede that maybe Hawley planned it that way. Sometimes the truth is whole lot more simple and mundane. Which makes it even more tragic.
Hi — I read this one last summer and I found the action-packed first part the best. The end was a bit of a fizzle, but I enjoyed getting there. here’s my take: http://www.thecuecard.com/books/summer-lists-mini-reviews/ . Cheers.
Agreed about the ending! I was expecting something big and then it was…what?! But then I wondered if Hawley wanted to show that sometimes there are no big conspiracies, just basic human emotions gone wrong.