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For fans of Lisa Jewell and Liv Constantine, The Last Flight is the story of two women - both alone, both scared - and one agonizing decision that will change the trajectory of both of their lives.
Two women. Two Flights. One last chance to disappear.
Claire Cook has a perfect life. Married to the scion of a political dynasty, with a Manhattan townhouse and a staff of ten, her surroundings are elegant, her days flawlessly choreographed, and her future auspicious. But behind closed doors, nothing is quite as it seems. That perfect husband has a temper that burns as bright as his promising political career, and he's not above using his staff to track Claire's every move, making sure she's living up to his impossible standards. But what he doesn't know is that Claire has worked for months on a plan to vanish.
A chance meeting in an airport bar brings her together with a woman whose circumstances seem equally dire. Together they make a last-minute decision to switch tickets ― Claire taking Eva's flight to Oakland, and Eva traveling to Puerto Rico as Claire. They believe the swap will give each of them the head start they need to begin again somewhere far away. But when the flight to Puerto Rico goes down, Claire realizes it's no longer a head start but a new life. Cut off, out of options, with the news of her death about to explode in the media, Claire will assume Eva's identity, and along with it, the secrets Eva fought so hard to keep hidden.
The novel is mostly character-driven, but it does have scenes of heart-stopping suspense that keep the pages flying late into the night. I can think of several instances where I literally gasped out loud at a particularly high-stress plot twist (and it was fun watching my spouse hit those same passages and have an identical reaction). The story isn't completely airtight — there are minor cases where an action or plot point doesn't seem entirely probable — but overall I found the novel highly entertaining and it was easy to overlook the negligible flaws. The Last Flight is the perfect antidote for summer malaise and makes a terrific "beach read."..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
The action in Julie Clark's novel The Last Flight begins as two women decide to switch identities at an airport and each board the other's flight. One of the two airplanes crashes into the ocean before reaching its destination.
In 2019, over 4.5 billion trips were scheduled on commercial airplanes worldwide, and 1.1 billion of these were on airlines serving the United States either domestically or internationally. It's big business, too; as of 2019, statistics reported by the FAA stated that aviation contributed more than 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, and approximately 10.6 million jobs in the country were being generated by the industry.
Following the first successful airplane flight made by Orville and Wilbur ...
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