Chilling, spine-tingling, suspenseful, terrifying, gripping.
These are among the promises made to potential book buyers to separate them from their cash.
Many, many times, the contents fail to deliver on any of the above.
Reading is such a personal activity and people have such wide-ranging tastes. I have friends who would not be seen dead with airport literature, which is one of my faves. But at times of great need, even the back of a cereal box would do.
As long as it does its promised job of entertaining, enthralling or informing.
A book, the one you chose from all the “pick me! pick me!” covers on packed shelves and displays, can let you down badly. It’s like forming a relationship: you can’t know everything about it at once, and its substance or lack thereof is only slowly revealed to you.
Sometimes you guess what will happen far too early. Or you don’t care enough about the characters to keep plodding on. Or it feels like the author has a contract to produce this many books and just churns one out. The reader is betrayed. One I remember was of a coroner whose lover had been killed, with all the accompanying anguish, just to have him come back to life in the next book. Like the Bobby Ewing resurrection in Dallas. Oh boy, remember that far back?
Never read another from that author.
But a beautifully woven tale can keep you gripped for 1 000 pages, others can break your heart in 300. As long as it “speaks” to you. There are those that don’t deserve 10 minutes and are best used as firelighters.
We all have our favourite authors, those who can’t write fast enough for our liking. Who always deliver.
No-name authors have a tough time with that first book – you have to hook, hold and be believed.
And so, we come to a new author whose book did have me hooked. For the first time in ages, I read cover to cover in one sitting because I really wanted to know what happened next. There were plenty of “nexts” too, but anything could happen in the end.
TJ Newman has written a winner here. Called Falling, a passenger jet carrying more than 140 people takes off from LA heading to JFK in New York when the pilot is told his family is being held hostage, his wife wrapped in explosives, and to save them he has to crash the plane.
Of course, all the usual rules apply: tell no one else, no police and so on. There is no ransom: it is a demonstration, obviously with an underlying cause, that Americans always think they are good because they always have the opportunity to do so. When that choice is removed, how “good” are they really?
Newman, a former flight attendant, started writing her novel on serviettes in her jump seat on overnight flights while her passengers were asleep. More than 40 publishers turned her down. Now, it has hit Number 1 on numerous best-seller lists, and 14 studios battled it out for the movie rights. Never give up, indeed.
Now we wait for the next one and hope it’s as good as (or better than) her debut. I hope she has many, many more serviettes up her sleeve.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor
The Independent on Saturday