For the first 39 years of my life I lived on Long Island and there are some events that stand out clearly in my memory. One of them is the crash of TWA Flight 800, which went down off the south shore of Suffolk County in 1996. One detail about it, in particular, that I remember is that the company I worked for at the time had freight on that plane including glitter used in theatrical productions.
The glitter was found all over the wreckage, which raised some interesting questions and baffled investigators a bit. You know how glitter gets everywhere. All of that glitter unfortunately does not get mentioned by Nelson DeMille in his fictionalized account of the investigation into TWA Flight 800. But he doesn’t ignore those hundreds of eyewitnesses who reported seeing a streak of light rise into the sky toward where the plane exploded just before it exploded. From there he spins this tale. John Corey, one of DeMille’s regular characters, returns as part of an anti-terrorism task force. He’s married now to Kate Mayfield, who also serves on the task force with him.
Kate talks John into attending a memorial service for the fifth anniversary of TWA Flight 800’s crash which she investigated and things take a dark turn from there. She takes him to see what remains were recovered and stored at an airplane hangar. She says she doesn’t want him poking around but brings him here anyway and tells him about all these witnesses saying they saw that light-streak thing before it blew up among whom were people who’d know what a missile going up looked like.
So then John starts investigating what happened himself, because even though everyone swears no missile hit it (including his wife), why would so many people say they saw one? Along the way he is abrasive to everyone he meets and evasive about everything except for when someone tells him not to do something, at which point he tells them he wasn’t going to do it anyway. That includes his wife and since she knows him so well, why did she entangle him in this mess to begin with? The answer is that there appears to be a missing piece of evidence which could tie everything together.
Many people talk about the light-streak, but no video of the crash supports this or does it? Both the anti-terrorism task force and John turn up evidence suggesting that there was a couple on a blanket on the beach that night who may have accidentally filmed the explosion; unfortunately, they have not come forward with the footage as far as anyone knows. The question is why. Night Fall is written as a thriller based on real-life events.
Could things have happened the way DeMille describes them? Yes. Could there have been a cover-up? Why would there be one? That’s something DeMille can’t answer, and he arranges matters so truth can never be known. There is suspense throughout over what will be revealed, but of course given its basis in reality it has to remain somewhat ambiguous.
Being 692 pages long, it’s quite a lengthy book to get through. However, I found that it gripped me and time flew while reading it. There were points where John Corey seemed to be becoming super-human, going days without sleep or rest and still functioning at the same capacity. This is one of my pet peeves with thrillers; characters who can go beyond normal physical and mental limits.
DeMille is guilty of this with Corey. He also steps on a lot of toes along the way. People appear to be helping him and then either change their minds or are scared off, but Corey doesn’t listen to any of them. This includes his wife, who starts to wish she hadn’t got him involved at all. What did she think was going to happen? She’s as flaky as he is sometimes for a Federal Agent.
Night Fall was good though. Some variation of the ending had to be done because there’s no explaining what happened if there was evidence being covered up for future books in the series which revolve around this event occurring later on down the line within them all together (which is true). I wasn’t too thrilled with how it ended though. Yes, it made sense given everything else in the story and what not but still.
It felt like a cheap trick ending almost where you’ve been led up until now believing something totally opposite would occur only for this other thing completely outside expectations happens instead type deal lol if that makes sense taken as thriller based off real life events fine otherwise nothing here really adds any more clarity into anything regarding said incident so yeah.
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