Up until the last few
pages, Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall
was going to get one of my rare 5 ratings.
The intense, nail-biting suspense makes it tough to put it down, but at
the end, it goes strangely downhill and suffers from a predictable ending. However, the majority of it is still a
wonderful read.
At the beginning, the
reader knows that there was a plane crash and that almost everyone on board
perished in it. The only survivors were
Scott, who was invited to take the trip last minute, and J.J., the young son of
a rich couple. Scott is able to get J.J.
to shore even though they are miles away, and the rest of the book is spent
delving into the backgrounds of each of the people on the manifest and those
that are left behind. The story here is
what happened to cause the plane crash, with lots of red herrings thrown in as
a distraction.
Hawley sets up each
chapter with the name of the person, their date of birth, and their date of death. While there are many unexpected details and
surprises throughout the book, the ending is disappointing and makes an
otherwise 5-star book go down to a solid four.
MY RATING - 4
