Lockout by John J. Nance

Lockout by John J. Nance
Pages: 412
Publication Date: November 15 2016
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Series: None

Review
Rating: 4.35 out of 5.0
Read: October 2 to 3 2016

*I received this book from NetGalley and WildBlue Press in return for a fair review.*

This is/was a quite thrilling, heart-pounding thrill-ride (hmm, I sound like I’m lifting something from a movie poster). Not start to finish, but a thrill-ride was in there.

It wasn’t a thrill-ride start to finish for an odd little reason – people. I didn’t particularly like any of the people/characters in the beginning, though most grew on me over time. Not necessarily to liking them so much as accepting them (though there were a few I grew to like). It was the human snippets that seemed a little much.

Like, I wasn’t sure why we needed the brief little POV snippets on the former Israeli PM’s mistress/Mossad plant. And all that stuff – all those pages after everything was ‘resolved’ – one way or another, seemed . . . anti-climatic. Some was probably needed, to a little extent, but mostly I found it annoying. I kept expecting to come to the end of a chapter and there’d be ‘The End’, but no, another chapter. Days/weeks/months later. Mmphs.

Right. So. Previously to reading this book, I’d read three books by Nance.

This one here is about a plane, Pangia Airlines Flight 10 (Airbus 330), flying from Tel Aviv (well, from some point before that, though its initial starting point wasn’t mentioned) to New York (not sure if New York was ultimate end point). Roughly around Ireland, the plane makes a U-turn and heads back to Tel Aviv Israel. Everyone on the ground is confused and attempts to get a response from the plane – but no answer.

Meanwhile, most on the plane, and the pilots, are happily going along the way, thinking that they are still heading the correct direction. The instrument displays lied. And the pilots were actually locked out of control of the plane. But it took a while for them to notice – because of the lying instruments. Locked out of control, and locked out of radio communication.

Meanwhile it turns out that an Airplane storage facility has found out that they have accidentally switched two planes – sending one to Pangia Airlines when it belonged to a leasing company. Several people attempt to unravel what occurred, and fix this issue. Both planes involved are the same model Airbus.

Meanwhile times . . . um, three? There’s this woman working in NSA attempting to figure out some strange signal noise hiding in satellite communications. She calls in help from the DIA.

Several story lines and several point of views, though those were the three main ones – switched planes, NSA woman, and plane flying outside of its pilots control.

As mentioned, I enjoyed the book. As I normally do when I read a Nance book – not really sure why this is only my fourth I’ve read.

October 3 2016