Linda A. (skymama) reviewed on 5/29/2014 + 14 more book reviews

Kathryn Lyons has a storybook life, a wonderful, loving, handsome husband who is an international-route airline pilot, a feisty fifteen year-old daughter, a beautiful home overlooking the ocean and a fulfilling job as a teacher. What more could she ask of life? It certainly is not to be awakened at 3:24 am in the morning by a knock on her door, a sound that only a pilot's wife, a soldier's wife, a cop's wife can fear. When the stranger says, "Mrs. Lyons?" she knows. Reading of the air crash that claimed her husband and 103 other people sent chills up my spine (shadows of 9-11). I immediately was drawn to the inner struggle of grief, loss and unbelief that Kathryn has to face. The story unwinds with delicate glimpses of humans at their worst and at their best: the media reporters who stalk her and her family, making their lives even more destroyed; the helpful young man from the pilot's union who seems to know the right things to say and do to comfort her; the agency officials who grill her without regard to her emotional state in their professional quest for the answers. What I found strangely lacking was no close family friends or coworkers to comfort her.

Then to add to her misery her dead husband is accused of being suicidal and deliberately causing the crash. She sifts through contents of his jeans pockets and finds fragments of papers with puzzling notations. Her curiosity draws her to a discovery that her husband of fifteen years was not what she thought he was. The story went astray after that and was never really concluded to my satisfaction.

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