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Product Description
Colonel John Quinn was a young, ambitious Air Force pilot who loved to fly - until an Iraqi missile nearly ended his career, and his life. Three surgeries and four years later, Quinn is functional, but not good enough to fly. Assigned to the Pentagon, he's prepared to spend the rest of his career in a series of boring staff jobs. Then a military Lear jet crashes shortly after takeoff in the rural farmlands outside Washington, and Quinn is called to lead the biggest investigation of his life. With this crash there are no survivors - a fact that is particularly sensitive in the White House, as the jet carried just one passenger; the President's brother. The crash scene offers little in the way of clues, and while the White House is pushing pilot error as the cause of the accident, Quinn is uncertain. Too many Washington insiders, including Quinn's former wife, a Ph.D. with the National Transportation Safety Board, seem to have a stake in the outcome of the investigation. Too many dodge the hard questions - or turn up dead. Filled with great characters and told with pulsing narrative drive, The Passenger is further proof that, as W.E.B. Griffin says, "Patrick Davis is the real thing."
Amazon.com Review
Like his creator Patrick A. Davis, Colonel John Quinn saw some air time during the Gulf War. Unlike Davis (who came home unscathed and became an airline pilot, and then during an enforced layoff authored the bestselling The General), Col. Quinn caught an Iraqi missile. He went through several agonizing surgeries, only to find out that he'd never fly again. Now he's stuck inside the Pentagon as a lowly assistant to the Air Force Chief of Safety, writing reports on air crash statistics, mourning his failed marriage, and waiting for retirement. Then the president's brother is killed in the highly suspicious crash of an Air Force Lear Jet near Washington, D.C., and Quinn gets the kind of wakeup call Harrison Ford would die for.
Against all odds, Quinn is put in charge of this political hot potato of an investigation by a superior officer who up until now apparently hated him. Quinn's ex-wife, a washed-out pilot, turns up at the crash scene as a top official from the National Safety Board--and she seems to have connections to the president's chief wheeler-dealer. Everybody concerned wants a quick and dirty investigation blaming pilot error, but Quinn won't sit still for it. The pilot was a good friend and a top flier; Quinn's partner turns up lots of nagging details about sabotage; and a look at the life of the president's brother reveals a possible scandal of epic proportions. Davis might not be the most stylish writer in the world, but he knows how to quickly sketch in a solid background of Pentagon and flying minutiae against which he sets his shadowy tale. --Dick Adler
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