This book is a work of fiction written around a true incident of a passenger aircraft that exploded over atlantic ocean in July 1996. Officially this crash has been recorded as an accident but there were a large number of people who saw this and to them it had looked like a missile attack.
The book starts with a couple having extra marital affair in the late evening on the beach recording themselves in a video camera. It was by chance that plane explosion gets clearly captured in the video tape. And now tape becomes an evidence but also threatens to expose the illicit affair of the couple, so they keep quiet about it. The investigation is restarted unofficially by an FBI contract agent 5 years after the incident, on a personal agenda, with a double challenge of finding a substantial evidence to refute earlier conclusion and hiding this effort from government agencies
The book gives a good insight into the process followed by FBI and CIA in conducting a detailed research, leaving no stone unturned. This includes technical hypothesis on all possible reasons for a plane crane starting from possibility of a missile attack to mechanical failure and evaluating the validity of each hypothesis. It highlights how in general witnesses behave under interrogation, their tendency of negating what they actually saw, countering other witnesses, and easily accepting the suggestions by interrogator. There are places where there is a strong suggestion of official cover up involved in recording the crash as accident, for unclear reasons. All through out the book there is a high level of professionalism displayed by investing agents, with lot of sarcastic humor in between. The ending has been dramatized with the investigation climax happening with world trade center bombing, proving that US has become a target of terrorism. Overall book is well written catching attention of readers at all times
I found only one incident questionable where according to author it takes 40 seconds for sound of plane explosion happening 12 km away to reach the beach, because of which witnesses missed what happened immedietely after explosion. After travelling this long the sound intensity should get highly reduced if not die. There is a remote chance of explosion catching ears of so many people