Book Review: Night Fall

I did not much care for Wild Fire, the 2006 thriller from Nelson Demille, mostly because John Corey's near-constant sarcasm wore thin in the context of that thriller set in and near an exclusive hunting club. Whatever else could be said for the story, Wild Fire laid the Corey schtick on so thick that even Corey's wife found it tiresome after awhile.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise to learn that the same kind of sarcasm plays much better in an earlier DeMille novel with the same lead characters. Night Fall (2004) is about John Corey's fictionalized attempt to unravel a real-life mystery that made headlines in the summer of 1996, namely, what happened to TWA Flight 800? Did mechanical failure in a center fuel tank trigger an explosion that killed everyone on board shortly after takeoff from New York, or were 230 people on a commercial airliner brought down by a missile?

Night Fall is heartfelt. Demille dedicates it to the people who died on TWA flight 800, but the book is also a valentine to the NYPD. Corey's sarcasm in Night Fall works because a lot of what he does while in a second career with the Anti-Terrorist Task Force depends on help from his NYPD buddies, chief among them former partner Dom Fanelli, who is utterly believable as a wisecracking homicide detective in his own right.

Demille knows cop banter, and understands that sarcasm in its natural milieu is what macho men use to disguise brotherly affection for each other. When Corey calls Fanelli as the latter is being dispatched to the scene of a double homicide, Fanelli makes time to listen to his old partner because the homicide victims "aren't going anywhere." Another call from Corey interrupts Fanelli at a family barbeque, and when Corey asks if Fanelli has a drink in his hand, the pitch-perfect (for 2001) reply is "Does the pope eat kielbasa?"

Demille was smart to write his best-known character into the TWA case five years after it had made news. While that makes clues harder to come by for John Corey, it also gave his creator the literary latitude to put John and his FBI agent wife on the job in late summer of 2001, and that timing is important to the story.

The bulk of the novel involves Corey's search for two people whom we know from the prologue inadvertently videotaped the demise of TWA flight 800 while having an extramarital romp with each other on the beach. Some of the tedium of investigative work leaches into the text. But the book's few slow parts are more than offset by knowing asides about trust, character, office politics, inter-agency rivalry, and many of the other things that color both John Corey's world and our own.

Demille did his homework: the various theories about what happened to Flight 800 each get a proper airing, although it's obvious which theory Demille thinks is most credible. Even the Manhattan bar used for several scenes is carefully chosen.

This novel demands maturity beyond that of the young-adult set, and its ending may leave some readers unsatisfied, but I put it down hoping that there are people like John Corey in the world, and knowing -- thanks to an NYPD connection in my own extended family and a cameo in the book from real-life hero John O'Neill -- that there are. Few authors can walk the line between convention and conspiracy as skillfully as Demille does here.