MISSING IN FLIGHT
About two hours into her flight home from a visit to her father, Makayla Rossi feels a sharp pain in her bladder and realizes that she desperately needs a bathroom break. But her fussy infant son, Liam, is finally snoozing peacefully. So rather than taking him with her and risk having him howl for the remaining five hours of the trip, she goes it alone. Naturally, she comes back to find Liam’s bassinet empty. Makayla alerts the cabin crew, who search the plane fruitlessly. The reader is teased with the usual missing-in-flight possibilities: Did someone steal Liam? Is Makayla, whose mother had transient global amnesia, suffering from a similar memory loss? Is she making the whole thing up? But anyone who wants answers has a while to wait. Cole seesaws back and forth between the crisis in the cabin and several innings of casual chit-chat between the pilot and copilot, and every bit of dialogue sounds exactly the same. Even Special Agent Castillo, once the flight crew decides to notify the authorities, speaks in the same pedantic, expository way as the frantic mother and harried flight attendants. It isn’t until Makayla’s husband, Jack, finally gets looped in that the heat gets turned up, and from there, the narrative gets flat-out bizarre. What starts as just another routine, midair missing baby hunt turns into a wild-ass killing spree that will make air travel seem even less appealing than the airlines’ new pricing and fee structures already have.
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About two hours into her flight home from a visit to her father, Makayla Rossi feels a sharp pain in her bladder and realizes that she desperately needs a bathroom break. But her fussy infant son, Liam, is finally snoozing peacefully. So rather than taking him with her and risk having him howl for the remaining five hours of the trip, she goes it alone. Naturally, she comes back to find Liam’s bassinet empty. Makayla alerts the cabin crew, who search the plane fruitlessly. The reader is teased with the usual missing-in-flight possibilities: Did someone steal Liam? Is Makayla, whose mother had transient global amnesia, suffering from a similar memory loss? Is she making the whole thing up? But anyone who wants answers has a while to wait. Cole seesaws back and forth between the crisis in the cabin and several innings of casual chit-chat between the pilot and copilot, and every bit of dialogue sounds exactly the same. Even Special Agent Castillo, once the flight crew decides to notify the authorities, speaks in the same pedantic, expository way as the frantic mother and harried flight attendants. It isn’t until Makayla’s husband, Jack, finally gets looped in that the heat gets turned up, and from there, the narrative gets flat-out bizarre. What starts as just another routine, midair missing baby hunt turns into a wild-ass killing spree that will make air travel seem even less appealing than the airlines’ new pricing and fee structures already have.