He didn’t answer. The sun was to the west, across the pond, putting a glint on the face of his father’s watch. The wind stirred crimson leaves, scattered a few to the water like flower petals tossed into a bride’s wake as she passed, honeymoon-bound.
As Scott Carson’s (Michael Koryta’s) Departure 37 begins, on an October morning later this year (2025), the skies over the entire US are empty of air traffic – early this morning, every pilot in the country got an impassioned phone call from his mother, begging him (or her) not to fly today. Some of these mothers are dead, which does not reduce the calls’ effect at all.
On a remote peninsula in Maine, a 16-year-old girl named Charlie Goodwin is dissatisfied with her life. Her widowed father has brought her here from Brooklyn to build a brewery, but she’s bored to death with small town life. Her only amusement is filming an old local named Abe Zimmer, who has a thousand conspiracy theories to share, centered on a famous military bomber crash that happened nearby in 1962. She posts these films online, and is getting considerable attention. She’s less happy about the presence of Abe’s grandson Lawrence, whom she considers a hopeless dork.
On this particular morning, Charlie’s father is away, which leaves the three of them the only human beings on the peninsula, in the area of the old airfield, when the military cordons the area off and a plane that’s been missing for 60 years suddenly appears in the sky over the airstrip.
Departure 37 is actually a complex story, following not only contemporary events but the events and characters that led up to the original 1962 air crash – the true story of which has never been revealed to the public.
The story gets pretty technical, in terms of theoretical and science fiction technology, and I have to admit I had trouble following it sometimes. It seemed to verge on technophobia at points. And I’m not entirely sure how to think about part of the story’s resolution.
But the characters were fascinating, the plotting tight (as always with Carson/Koryta), and the drama level high. This wasn’t really my kind of book, but I’m sure many will like it more than I did – and I liked it pretty well.