Before the Fall
by Noah Hawley
Summary
A private jet lifts off from Martha's Vineyard in night fog with eleven aboard: David Bateman, founder of a combative cable news empire, his wife and two children, their security man, a Wall Street couple, the crew, a flight attendant, and one anomaly, Scott Burroughs, a middle aged painter of disaster scenes going nowhere in particular, invited aboard that morning by the mogul's wife with the casualness that will obsess investigators. Sixteen minutes later the plane is in the Atlantic. Scott surfaces in the dark, finds four year old JJ Bateman clinging to wreckage, and swims, dislocated shoulder and all, ten miles of night ocean with the boy on his back.
Hawley then runs the two stories his structure is built for. Forward: the crash investigation, flight recorders and hedge fund subpoenas, and the media machine the dead man himself built turning on his rescuer, Bateman's own network, led by a demagogic anchor with debts to the family, converting the hero swimmer into a suspect, the lone survivor with the convenient painting portfolio of catastrophes. Backward: chapter by chapter, the lives of everyone on the manifest, each passenger's road to the tarmac, the money launderer's panic, the bodyguard's last day, the marriage settling into the sea, until the sixteen minutes can finally be assembled from the inside, the cause arriving as character rather than conspiracy.
Around three hundred and ninety pages, engineered like the television Hawley runs.
Best for readers who want the plane crash procedural braided with a media age morality play, and an ending that indicts appetite rather than fate.
Historical Context & Significance
Before the Fall won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2017, the crime establishment crowning a showrunner: Noah Hawley was mid run as the creator of television's Fargo, whose anthology reinvention had collected Emmys and Peabodys, and the novel's win completed the rare double career, the year's best mystery written between seasons.
The book was the summer's publishing phenomenon, a bestseller sold with film rights attached before publication, and its cable news demagogue, written before the 2016 election and read after it, gave the reviews their talking point; the anchor's playbook aged into documentary.
Hawley's earlier novels had sold modestly, this one's success reordering the shelf, and his subsequent fiction, Anthem, continued alongside the television empire, Alien: Earth added to it; the Edgar remains the print half's headline credential, the award's committee choosing, that year, the best constructed machine in the room.