Nothing like the harsh fluorescent glare you find in commercial planes. To try to predict the places we’ll go and the people we’ll meet would be pointless.Ī soft halogen glow emanates from the louvered forward hatch. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery.

They moved to San Diego when she was nine.Įveryone has their path. The flight attendant, Emma Lightner, was born in Mannheim, Germany, to an American air force lieutenant and his teenage wife. Charlie Busch, the first officer, is from Odessa, Texas. The ownership of record is a Dutch holding company with a Cayman Island mailing address, but the logo on the fuselage says GULLWING AIR. Whose plane it is is hard to say with real certainty. It is a nine-seat OSPRY 700SL, built in 2001 in Wichita, Kansas. Read ExcerptĪ private plane sits on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard, forward stairs deployed. Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Novel and the 2017 International Thriller Writers Award For Best Novelįrom the Award-Winning Creator of Fargo Comes “One of the Year’s Best Suspense Novels” ( New York Times). Kristin Hannah raves, “Noah Hawley really knows how to keep a reader turning the pages… a complex, compulsively readable thrill ride of a novel.” Amid trauma and chaos, the fragile relationship between Scott and the young boy grows and glows at the heart of this stunning novel, raising questions of fate, morality, and the inextricable ties that bind us together. Was it by chance that so many influential people perished? Or was something more sinister at work? A storm of media attention brings Scott fame that quickly morphs into notoriety and accusations, and he scrambles to salvage truth from the wreckage. The only survivors are the painter Scott Burroughs and a four-year-old boy, who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul’s family.

Sixteen minutes later, the unthinkable happens: the plane plunges into the ocean. On a foggy summer night, eleven people–ten privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter–depart Martha’s Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley