Departure 37

by Scott Carson ★★★★☆

It's always exciting when an author I have loved in the past comes out with a new book. It's also a fork in the road: either the second book is as good (or better) than the first, instantly putting them on a "pre-order every time" list; or, the second book doesn't quite live up to (potentially inflated) expectations.

I had read a couple of Michael Koryta books years ago, but last year's Lost Man's Lane was the first Scott Carson book (Koryta's pen name) that I had read. Upon finishing it, I struggled to find a component I didn't enjoy. As I wrote at the time,

"There's a bit of everything in Lost Man's Lane -- it's a coming-of-age story centered around a mystery, that mixes in the supernatural, family bonds, friendship, teenage romance, and even a smidge (or more) of horror... There's even a good amount of humor to balance some of the intensity, and several truly laugh-out-loud scenes make it one of the funniest books I read this year. There's little I can say by way of critique -- that diverse hodgepodge of components is without a weak link."

All of that propelled it to the #1 slot in my Best Books of 2024 list, and had me doubly excited—and a little trepidatious—for what this year's follow-up would yield.

Departure 37 starts off with pilots across America receiving a call in the middle of the night from their mother—whether their mother was still living or not—imploring them not to fly the next day, and refusing to hang up until their child agreed. The result is a nationwide grounding of all commercial aircraft. We swiftly come to learn that this was an activation of "Seeker Script", and AI program created by Sector Six, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sub-group focused on making sure that "America never paid for a mistake in the name of research." In this case, the mistake in question involved making planes disappear in the 1960s at the height of tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. One such plane that had disappeared in 1962 has allegedly returned in 2025...and it's carrying an active nuclear bomb.

It's a great setup for a novel, and I was hooked. The story runs in two parallel timelines. The first is in the near-future (October 2025), at an old Naval Research base in remote Ash Point, Maine, where two high school students—Charlie Goodwin and Lawrence Zimmer—along with Lawrence's grandfather, Abe, are trying to figure out the strange travel disruption that has hit the United States. Ash Point is the site of an old B-52 bomber crash in 1962, which Abe witnessed, and he swears there was a survivor who was whisked away by military personnel, never to be seen again. The second is in 1961-62, where Dr. Martin Hazelton is working to determine the answer to one question: "If an atomic bomb was detonated over the continental United States, how might planes in the air be shielded?" He runs hundreds of tests on radio-controlled model airplanes, until he stumbles on a discovery that ultimately creates the situation at the center of the novel.

The structure and setup were all ready-made for another thriller that I would enjoy...but this once didn't quite come together in the same way for me that Lost Man's Lane did. I actually enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second half, and while it didn't crash and burn, let's just say the takeoff was quite a bit better than the landing. There were plenty of solid moments, but there were enough gaps—either in plot choices or execution of the story—that I found myself not quite as in love with the novel. The deep dive into the early days of the Cold War was interesting, especially on the heels of the movie Oppenheimer last year and the renewed focus on the early nuclear era that it helped generate, but the supernatural explanations in this one were just a tiny bit too silly for me, and the character arc of Marty Hazelton in particular went in a direction I didn't love.

Setting those nits aside, there's plenty of goodness here. A combination of inflated expectations before I read a word, combined with a really solid start, simply left me a bit disappointed when the payoff wasn't quite what I wanted it to be. Nevertheless, a solid effort from Carson again, and I think a book that will be particularly enjoyed by anyone old enough to have lived through the uncertainty of the Bay of Pigs, the days of duck-and-cover drills (because hiding under your desk was going to save you from a nuclear blast!), or even just those of us who can remember the Cold War, when tensions with the Soviet Union were so high for so long. If you're choosing where to start reading Scott Carson, definitely choose Lost Man's Lane over this one, but Departure 37 still manages to land the plane with a better-than-average score.