BEFORE THE FALL by Noah Hawley

I don’t read a lot of thrillers, but I love to read a really good one, and this is a really good one.  A private jet crashes with a couple of billionaires on board, plus their wives, two children, the crew, a bodyguard, and an artist who may finally be hitting his stride.  The artist, Scott Burroughs, is a casual friend of Maggie Bateman, whose husband David, an executive for a conservative news network, has arranged the private jet.  Maggie has invited Scott and another couple, Ben and Sarah Kipling, to join them on a short flight from Martha’s Vineyard to New York. Ben, unbeknownst to Maggie at the time, is about to be indicted for laundering money from hostile foreign entities.  The plane crashes 18 minutes after takeoff, and Scott, an excellent swimmer inspired by Jack LaLanne’s swimming feats, survives the crash and manages to get himself and 4-year-old JJ to shore through sheer force of will.  Now he’s being pursued by the media, the members of which have differing opinions as to whether he’s a hero or somehow responsible for the crash.  Fueling the furor is the fact that his most recent paintings all depict epic disasters.  The format of this novel has its pluses and minuses.  The author presents each passenger’s backstory in separate chapters, interleaved with the aftermath story, focused primarily on Scott.  Some backstories are most interesting than others, but I get that the author wants to give equal weight to each passenger so that we readers can draw our own conclusion as to what caused the plane to go down.  The post-crash story, though, is what really drives the page-turning.  We want to know what the NTSB is going to find on the bottom of the ocean and what’s on the data recorder, but I also was eager to know what lies in store for Scott, who is savvy in some ways and naïve in others.  He seems to be the kind of person who expects the best from people but discovers that there are some unscrupulous people who see a conspiracy around every corner and want to recast the victims as perpetrators.