You can read the first 20 chapters right here, just click the logo.
Posted on 10/13/2004 1:41:35 AM PDT by Lancey Howard
Nelson DeMille's new book may interest some people here at Free Republic. I know Nelson and his books have been discussed here from time to time in the past.
Popular author (and Vietnam veteran) Nelson DeMille has written a new book, Night Fall, set to come out at the end of November. It apparently goes right after the TWA Flight 800 cover-up.
Here are some reviews and a book description from Amazon:
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
John Corey, former NYPD homicide detective, assigned to the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force in the pre-millennium 90's, makes a return appearance in a thoughtful novel offering an alternative to the government's "official" position on what really happened to TWA Flight 800, which crashed off the Long Island coast in the summer of 1996.
Accompanying his wife Kate to a memorial marking the five-year anniversary of the crash, Corey's curiosity is aroused by what appears to be a concerted effort by Kate's fellow federal agents to keep him--and her--from investigating a case that appears to be closed. Corey's detecting skills lead him to two witnesses to the crash, who were enjoying an adulterous interlude on the beach at the time the plane went down--and videotaping their sexual escapades while what appears to be a terrorist missile attack takes place in the background.
What ratchets up the tension in this capably written thriller is what the reader knows but Corey doesn't as he heads for a showdown with those responsible for the official cover-up as the clock ticks down to the morning of September 11, 2001.
DeMille's deft touch with a riddle wrapped in an enigma--what really happened to Flight 800--makes his "what if" scenario a more than plausible theory; you don't have to believe in conspiracies or government cover-ups to find his latest engrossing, entertaining, and enlightening. --Jane Adams
From Publishers Weekly
Demille's latest is sure to be a #1 bestseller—but it's also sure to be controversial. The book is centered on an investigation of the July 1996 crash of flight TWA 800, "when... a big Boeing 747 bound for Paris with 230 passengers and crew on board, exploded off the Atlantic coast of Long Island, sending all 230 souls to their deaths."
In July 2001, Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force detective John Corey, a brilliant, smart-ass detective last seen in Plum Island and The Lion's Game, accompanies his FBI agent wife, Kate Mayfield, to the fifth anniversary of the disaster. John, whose wife worked the crash in 1996, understands that Kate has brought him along because she doesn't buy the official finding of "mechanical failure" and wants him to mount his own investigation.
There are 200 eyewitnesses who swear they saw a missile lift into the clear night sky and bring down the airplane, a charge dismissed by the CIA as an optical illusion. Though Corey is warned away from the investigation, like any good fictional detective, this only serves to spur him on. He uncovers evidence that a man and a woman, on the beach that fateful night videotaping their adulterous affair, inadvertently caught on tape the missile hitting the plane.
The book is primarily about John tracking down the couple, but as the end nears, readers will begin to understand the perilous direction in which Demille is leading them. The pages will turn in a blur as a feeling of dread grows, until the end comes and one's worst fears are confirmed. Readers will think about this one for a long time.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In The Lion's Game (1999), DeMille left open the possibility for a sequel, and here it is. Former NYPD cop John Corey now works for the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force, but, no, the story is not about our current war on terror--at least, not exactly.
The book opens in the summer of 1986 with two seemingly innocent characters witnessing the real-life crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound. Cut to the fifth anniversary of the crash, which finds John Corey and his wife, FBI agent Kate Mayfield, who was on the team that investigated Flight 800, still not convinced that mechanical failure caused the 747 to explode in the sky, especially given the fact that hundreds of witnesses saw a white streak of light ascending toward the aircraft prior to the crash. Could terrorism have played a role? Is there a government cover-up? The no-nonsense John doesn't usually buy conspiracy theories, but this time the facts drive him and his wife to unofficially reopen the case, much to the chagrin of some powerful people.
By setting the story during the summer of 2001, before the events of 9/11 made us forget Flight 800, DeMille underscores both the many unanswered questions about multiple plots against the U.S and the turf wars that have resulted in miscues among the various intelligence agencies. A timely and intense thriller starring a thoroughly likable hero, whose final scene promises yet another return.
Mary Frances Wilkens Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
On a Long Island beach at dusk, Bob Mitchell and Janet Whitney conduct their illicit love affair in front of a video camera, set to record each steamy moment. Suddenly a terrible explosion lights up the sky. Grabbing the camera, the couple flees as approaching police cars speed toward the scene. Five years later, the crash of Flight 800 has been attributed to a mechanical mal-function. But for John Corey and Kate Mayfield, both members of the Elite Anti-terrorist Task Force, the case is not closed.
Suspecting a cover-up at the highest levels and disobeying orders, they set out to find the one piece of evidence that will prove the truth about what really happened to Flight 800-the videotape that shows a couple making love on the beach and the last moments of the doomed airliner.
Thanks for the recommendation. I have the hardest time finding new authors and look forward to trying out Hiassen.
I just ordered this book at Literaryguild.com. It was only $13.49 for members. The cost at Amazon.com was $18.33.
1996?
I'll assume that you already read Elmore Leonard. If not, or if you only know his Get Shorty era stuff then go back to his work from the seventies and eighties. He's so good that nearly everything he writes goes best seller and then to Hollywood.
"Optical illusion." Is that bureaucratese for "swamp gas?"
I used Flight 800 in my own book as an example of how the fedgov can "manage" an inconvenient crisis using a hand-picked "blue ribbon panel" (which will be certain to ignore the facts which don't fit the precooked result).
The Vince Foster case was another example of this scandal management at work. In fact, the list is quite long: Waco, OKC, etc.
Bump for the left coast morning crew.
How Richard Clarke concocted the TWA 800 'exit strategy' ... and why
You can read the first 20 chapters right here, just click the logo.
Great Clarke / 800 thread! I did miss it.
WORD OF HONOR is a wonderful, but painful and gut-wrenching exploration into the loyalties that are so important to those who serve in the military.
That novel, (now that you have me thinking about it), more than anything else, helped me understand my son's military experience.
Loved the Gold Coast, too. I grew up in that area and was acquainted with a mob family from Great Neck so I found it especially enjoyable and so funny.
Just ordered Nightfall. My husband and I always look forward to DeMille's books which don't come out that often.
That's it. The Lion's Game. That is the one I read during the height of 9/11.
On Sept. 20, one mainstream newspaper released the story of how the so-called Gore Commission failed conspicuously to address airline safety. The paper claimed that this failure "represents the clearest recent public example of the success that airlines have long had in defeating calls for more oversight."
The paper traced that failure to a series of campaign donations from the airlines to the Democratic National Committee in 1996 in the wake of the crash of TWA Flight 800, donations likely solicited by Al Gore himself. That newspaper just happened to be John Kerry's hometown Boston Globe.
Yes, Clinton and Gore did abandon airport security planning for sake of campaign cash. But worse, they concealed the real cause of the crash, in no small part to justify that abandonment.
In fact, on the same day in September of 1996 that Al Gore sent the airline's lobbyist a letter signaling his intent to roll over, the National Transportation Safety Board reversed its spin and all but ruled out a bomb or missile strike [on TWA 800].
In our book, "First Strike," James Sanders and I make this arguably prophetic comment:
John Kerry seemed to have his sights on Al Gore's Achilles' heel. After the events of Sept. 11, the story of how Al Gore helped subvert the investigation into TWA 800 and undermine airport security may yet prove to be a career-killer. Kerry's "slips" may have put Gore out of the race even before he got in.
Two weeks after advanced copies of "First Strike" started circulating around Washington, Gore withdrew from the presidential race. His withdrawal shocked Washington. It did not shock Sanders and me. We expected it. Kerry plays hardball, too.
See also:
Why John Kerry talks about TWA 800
On Aug. 22, 1996, just a few days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI. Immediately after this meeting, as it happened, all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.
On the next day, for instance, the FAA began to inquire whether any dog-training exercises had ever taken place on the plane that would become TWA 800. On the same day, as CNN reported, the FBI now claimed publicly for the first time that the explosive residue found along the right wing "could have been brought on the plane by a passenger and was not part of a bomb." Likewise, after the meeting, the FBI would do no more eyewitness interviews, at least not for the next two months. The Bureau only did a handful after that – and all of those for the wrong reasons.
I missed that one too.
I had heard the 'not a stinger' argument from a lot of folks, 'due to altitude' at the time...
My thinking was, with so many people seeing evidence of a missile, why couldn't it have been a larger aa missile, perhaps launched from a hostile submarine?
It appears from the review in that linked article, that the altitude of TWA-800, however, was NOT as high in the sky as Clarke indicated... and within reach of a simple shoulder fired stinger/rowboat combo.
Clark's assertion that Clinton was ready to go to war with Iran if it turned out to be their attack that brought the plane down... seems a little out of character. The only thing HE would go to war over, was if somebody tried to put a real separation between Clinton, the interns and the mcdonald's cheesburgers.
(btw:Did the Iranians have subs then, or now?)
The timing was bad to have an actual foreign-sponsored terror attack bringing down a jetliner. So it was buried, no problemo. File it with Vince Foster and all the other sham investigations.
Try Tim Dorsey....Stingray Shuffle, Triggerfish Twist, etc...
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