Final Flight

Final Flight by Eric C. Anderson   284 pages

In March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpar International Airport.  Nothing unusual happened during takeoff. The pilots were experience. The flight was crowded with 227 passengers and 12 crew members taking a red-eye to Ho Chi Min City. A little less than one hour later, the plane disappeared from both Kuala Lumpar and Ho Chi Min City’s radars. As far as I know, neither the plane’s fuselage nor bodies has ever been located. There were no distress signals.  It just disappeared as if it never existed.

Great start for a thriller novel. Fast forward to 2023. And that’s where I got lost.  There were too many details, too many characters, too much going on that I couldn’t follow the plot.  But here’s the synopsis from the book jacket:

“Former Air Force maintenance officer Jason Montgomery and his erstwhile wrench-twister, Rob "Ski" Kalawski, have just landed the gig of their lives. China Air's aging fleet of Boeing 777s now desperately needs navigation hardware and software upgrades. It's a multimillion-dollar contract, and they're just the guys to do it. Too easy, right?

“Wrong. The Japanese firm supplying the gear knows the Chinese will reverse-engineer and steal it, so they've planted a deadly navigation bug to trigger at the first sign of theft. Jason's just the middleman, but he finds himself trapped between yakuza gangsters, a tattooed dragon-lady sales exec, and murderous Russian mobsters looking to make a profit on the missing airplanes and passengers. If these crazies don't start behaving like moral adults, people are going to die by the hundreds . . . and they do.”

I would like to blame my lack of “getting it” due to the major distraction of the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020, but I haven’t had any trouble focusing on the other 20 or so books I’ve finished since March. There were too many characters who were too hard to keep straight and too many details that caused my brain to glaze over.  By the end, I was just reading words.

“Final Flight” was nothing like I expected or hoped it would be.  Therefore “Final Flight” receives 1 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.