downing of a transatlantic plane
Without a Trace
Mari Hannah is a new author to me, but I noted that she was a probation officer and that her partner is an ex-murder detective, so I was intrigued to see what she would make of a police procedural novel, Without a Trace. There’s nothing quite like actual real life experience to convey authenticity.
The first paragraph hooks us in immediately: DCI Kate Daniels of the Murder Investigation Team, Northumbria Police, is in a major incident suite in London, almost 300 miles from her home patch, staring at an enormous electronic screen as the names of 315 passengers and crew on a transatlantic aircraft are uploaded. The plane has, without warning, and with no Mayday transmission, vanished from radar 150 miles from New York’s JFK, and Kate is inwardly rehearsing a pack of lies that would give her access to an investigation well outside her jurisdiction.
Because booked on board Flight 0113 was a professional colleague from her team, psychologist and profiler Jo Soulsby, who also happens to be her soulmate and lover. But just days before they had had a serious disagreement and Jo had walked out, and bought that fateful ticket to America. Kate is wracked with guilt for having put her work above domestic happiness and driven Jo away. If only she could speak to her again and make reparation. And it’s this desperate need that drives her in her search to prove against all reason and logic that Jo didn’t actually board that fated plane and is somewhere still breathing, still waiting for her.
But Kate has an even bigger motivation driving her. She’s very much a hands-on officer, used to chasing dangerous fanatics, prepared to die for a just cause, and her heart bleeds for the hundreds of relatives, friends and colleagues of those on board who will never see their loved ones again. So she launches herself into the hunt for the criminals responsible, by-passing convention, pulling strings, invading other people’s territories, courting danger in the criminal underworld, whatever it takes to bring the villains responsible to justice. The consensus view is that a bomb had been planted on board, so she sets things in motion to scrutinise all the London Heathrow airport personnel who might have been involved, even going under cover herself in the baggage-handling shed.
But then she receives information which indicates she’s looking in completely the wrong direction. What’s more, after a beating by an informant’s thug, Kate is not functioning as she should, chunks of memory are eluding her. And it’s then that one of the senior detectives on her team, Acting DI Robson, is brutally killed, and his body tossed from a moving vehicle, and suddenly the whole squad and their families are in grave danger. So now Kate owes it to Robson’s wife and son to hunt down his assassins. And she’s prepared to defy all the officers sent to protect her in order to do so – to lie, to employ any subterfuge necessary. But with each move the potential grows for more lives to be lost; these are ruthless operators with no regard for the sanctity of life, rival drug lords playing for absurdly high stakes in terms of power as well as money..
It’s unusual in my experience to have the whole complicated chain of events spelled out systematically at the end of the book. I’m not sure if I liked it, but it did answer a few outstanding questions. And it followed on nicely from my consideration of the real-life downing of Pan Am 103 I shared with you last week.