Tommy calls his former colleague and Washington senior incident investigator Susan Tanaka. Tanaka assembles a Go-Team, including John Roby from Manchester, England who is the fire and explosives expert. Roby diverts from Vancouver and heads to Portland to participate in the investigation. Also on the team is Kathryn “Kiki” Duval known as "the sonar witch." Kiki is in charge of retrieving information from the CVR - cockpit voice recorder - (black box which is actually not black but orange). The "Crashers" are NTSB personnel who respond to these incidents and reconstruct the evidence to find the cause.

Meanwhile, Daria Gibron, who now works undercover for ATF, provides weapons to an Irishman named “Jack” after meeting with him in a bar in West Los Angeles. Daria, a former Israeli intelligence agent, blew the whistle on an illegal assassination attempt and was shot in the process. She then moved to the United States.  Jack is a terrorist with a long list of assassinations whose real name is Donal O' Meara and is best described as "Ebola on a bad day." Daria is supported by Ray Calabrese - her FBI handler. 

Every techno thriller needs an interesting villain. Meet Dennis Silverman, who was able to crash the plane using his computer from a rest stop on the ground. Silverman is the brilliant but evil employee of Gamblan, a company which provides state of the art flight data recorders that can analyze much more quickly and more efficiently all of the components of flight. Silverman is using this first crash as a demonstration to Donal, with a promise he can crash the specific plane the terrorists are seeking to destroy.

Crashers is the debut thriller of Dana Haynes. It starts off quickly but then gets mired in the detail of what happens at an NTSB investigation and reads more like a policy and procedure manual than a thriller. Fortunately, the action returns and the ending is much more exciting. There is much to learn about the 200,000 parts which compose an airliner and Haynes would be better served to provide them in much smaller portions. Haynes does do a good job with character development which may portend that a sequel is in the offing.

Overall Crashers does not live up to its potential but the concept of using technology to cause an airplane crash and leave no evidence behind provides an interesting format. Overall, an okay first effort.

--Jerry Solot