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Author Megan Rust is an Alaskan and a professional pilot. Her third novel featuring Taylor Morgan, a contract pilot flying for Life Guard Alaska, an air ambulance service, feels authentic. The details of flying, making dicey landings in marginal weather, and the Alaskan countryside, all feel true and ring with accuracy. The settings are compelling. Her characters are less so, in spite of their exoticism. There seems to be a minimum of simple speaking; characters are always murmuring, yelling or speaking rhetorically. Their relationships teeter on the edge of destruction or implosion. These shortcomings pull down what could be a clean, simple story of murder. Someone has killed an LGA chief pilot, with a "gunshot blast to the chest." The police, apparently with little investigation, label the crime a burglary gone wrong, in which the dead man is assumed to have surprised a burglar who took out his anger by killing the pilot. Taylor Morgan, a co-worker of the dead pilot, immediately assumes the cops are wrong and sets off to prove it by finding a murderer. In the process she indiscriminately talks with potential suspects, thereby putting herself, her lover and the air ambulance service, in jeopardy. How Morgan avoids attempts on her life and unmasks the killer forms the bulk of the story, together with Morgan's frequent missteps in her personal relationships. For me, the lack of suspense and weak characterizations overshadowed the taut flying scenes.
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, April 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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