Flight
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Jan Burke |
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| Edgar Award-winning author Jan Burke, acclaimed for her Irene Kelly novels, hits the ground running with a harrowing thriller featuring homicide detective Frank Harriman. When the wreckage of a small plane belonging to a Las Piernas Police Department detective who disappeared a decade ago is discovered in the San Bernardino Mountains, an emotional and disturbing triple-homicide case is reopened with a vengeance. Was the pilot a sellout who murdered a key witness? Alone, following his instincts, Frank traces the path of his predecessor to uncover the truth—and… | |
Edgar Award-winning author Jan Burke, acclaimed for her Irene Kelly novels, hits the ground running with a harrowing thriller featuring homicide detective Frank Harriman. When the wreckage of a small plane belonging to a Las Piernas Police Department detective who disappeared a decade ago is discovered in the San Bernardino Mountains, an emotional and disturbing triple-homicide case is reopened with a vengeance. Was the pilot a sellout who murdered a key witness? Alone, following his instincts, Frank traces the path of his predecessor to uncover the truth—and comes face-to-face with a madman whose killing intent has just taken off.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Jan Burke is best known as the author who gave life to Irene Kelly, the sassy, slightly hard-edged southern California journalist with a Pandoran penchant for getting herself into sticky situations. Her latest novel, however, perches adroitly on a tangential narrative branch: Burke focuses on Kelly’s husband, Las Piernas Detective Frank Harriman, and in doing so turns her narrative color wheel several notches to the darker side.
Flight is really the story of two men, Harriman and Philip Lefebvre. Ten years ago, when businessman Trent Randolph and his daughter were murdered, Lefebvre was the officer in charge of the case. Moody and isolated, he became not only investigator but guardian angel to Randolph’s young son Seth, left clinging to life after the attack. His colleagues and the community were convinced Whitey Dane, a local mobster with grand ambitions, was behind the murders, but when Seth was killed in his hospital bed and both Lefebvre and all the evidence against Dane disappeared, the department was left reeling in the wake of crooked-cop iniquity.
But now Lefebvre’s apparently sabotaged plane has been discovered in the mountains, along with his bones. Frank Harriman must ease through a maze of anger and recrimination as he pursues the possibility of Lefebvre’s innocence. But if this cop was innocent, that means another one wasn’t—and that individual will stop at nothing to protect his guilty secret.
The novel’s opening chapters, which place the original murders in stark relief and reveal the trap slowly closing around Lefebvre, are as good as anything Burke has written—maybe better. Their intensity is difficult to match, but Harriman’s investigation still has plenty of surprises, including a nifty twist at the very end. Flight‘s solid writing, deftly nuanced relationships, and delicate bad-guy balance between chilling and camp are as on target here as elsewhere. Here’s to Irene and Frank; long may they take turns at the wheel. —Kelly Flynn
Barnes and Noble
Refusing to rest on her laurels after winning an Edgar Award for her seventh novel, the succinctly titled Bones, popular suspense novelist Jan Burke made an effective departure from all her earlier books, all of which featured feisty California journalist Irene Kelly. Flight places Irene in a subordinate role, focusing instead on her husband, veteran homicide detective Frank Harriman.
The story opens with an extended prologue in which Las Piernas homicide investigator Phil Lefebvre, responding to an anonymous phone call, stumbles across the corpses of wealthy industrialist Trent Randolph and his teenage daughter, Amanda. He also discovers Randolph’s badly wounded young son, Seth, and saves the boy’s life. Lefebvre then mounts an investigation that
successfully implicates local crime lord Whitey Dane. Before Dane can be brought to trial, three things happen. Seth Randolph is murdered in his hospital room; virtually all forensic evidence disappears; and Phil Lefebvre flees from the scene in a small private plane. The case against Dane disintegrates, and Lefebvre vanishes without a trace, leaving unanswered questions—and a shattered reputation—in his wake.
Ten years later, hikers discover Lefebvre’s mummified corpse amid the wreckage of his plane, which had crashed in the San Bernardino Mountains shortly after takeoff. The long-dormant case is reopened, and Frank Harriman begins to reinvestigate. He quickly learns that the downed plane had been sabotaged and comes to believe that Lefebvre—whose name has become anathema in the Las Piernas Police Department—may have been a victim, not a murderer-for-hire. Frank’s defense of Lefebvre isolates him from his fellow officers and stirs up a proverbial hornet’s nest of controversy and residual bitterness. At the same time, his painstaking investigation gradually
captures the attention of the Looking Glass Man, a deranged killer who has successfully pursued his own violent agenda for more than a dozen years.
Flight is a gripping, consistently readable novel, but not a perfect one. The prose is occasionally pedestrian and the excessively elaborate plot sometimes strains credibility. The real heart of the novel—and its primary source of pleasure—lies in its subtle, cumulatively affecting presentation of two very similar men: Frank Harriman and Phil Lefebvre, decent, intuitive policemen with highly individual standards of ethical behavior. As Harriman follows in a dead man’s footsteps, bringing Lefebvre’s investigation to a belated—and satisfying—conclusion, Flight rises above its generic origins, acquiring an unmistakable emotional power that is all its own. (Bill Sheehan)
