Fly by Night

While Larsen deserves credit for crafting an unusual contemporary action hero, air crash investigator Jammer Davis, this sequel to 2010’s Fly by Wire doesn’t maintain altitude. Davis’s old boss at the National Transportation Safety Board recruits Davis, a single father whose wife died in a car accident, to find the truth behind the suspicious disappearance of a Blackstar, an advanced CIA unmanned aerial vehicle, near the Horn of Africa. The CIA wants to use an inquiry into the crash of a DC-3 near the Sudan as the pretext for Davis to get information about the Blackstar. Five minutes after landing in Khartoum, Davis is battling for his life and continues to do so for the rest of the book. All the standard plot devices are present and accounted for, including a love interest in the person of a sexy Italian doctor. Readers who demand little realism in their thrillers will be most rewarded. (Nov.)