SPOILERS!!!
This novel is more interesting than I first thought.
Mina realises that there is something strange going on when she finds her daughter's photograph in the wallet of the dead man. What worries her is that the picture was taken that very morning. Then on one of the trays she finds an envelope addressed to her, and she fears the worst when she locks herself in the toilet to read it. The note inside the envelope tells her to follow instructions or her daughter will die. What she needs to do is to make an excuse to get one of the pilots out of the cockpit and let some stranger inside. Mina is horrified, but she knows she will do anything to save Sophia.
At home after his encounter with the man demanding money, Becca, the babysitter, helps him and Adam tells her everything. It is not true that he and Tanya had an affair. The truth is that he gambles and owes a lot of money, which made him resort to loan sharks. He should have told the truth to Mina, but he was ashamed, and he says that borrowing money from loan sharks is a crime in his line of work, and he will lose his job.
Adam suddenly feels very tired and sleepy, and asks Becca if what she has given him is a paracetamol. Becca then reveals that he has taken a sleeping pill, and she grabs Sophia and threatens to inject insulin to her. She says that she is not seventeen, but twenty-three, and if Mina does what she has to do, nobody will be hurt. Adam realises that Mina's plane is in danger, and then he passes out.
On the plane soon the truth comes out when someone identifies himself as Amazon as the new pilot. This is one of the passengers who we have learnt about, and he is the gamer who has many hours training in flight simulators as well as having a licence as a pilot. Mina has to reveal that she was forced to get the man inside because she has been threatened, and some of her colleagues understand her but others don't. Mina thinks that the person in charge is a passenger who is the gamer, but we know that there is someone pulling the strings which is passenger 1C. All the other passengers whose lives we know throught their accounts are part of the atack. They belong to a environmental group, who demand the government pass some measures to find planes which do not respect the environment. If their demands are not respected, the plane will crash and kill everybody.
One lady who Mina had to make put her pack in the compartment raises her voice, and she is also part of the group and when she lifts her shirt, the woman has a bomb attached to her body, and everybody is frightened. AT some point Erik, one of the crew, tries to attack her, and in the process Carmel gets involved and is killed with a corkscrew.
In Mina's house Adam wakes up to find himself handcuffed to a metal tube in the basement and Sophia is with him. Becca has left the radio on, and he hears that the authorities are worried because there is no communication with Mina's plane, and it seems that there are some threat from some ecological group. In one of the news openings Adam is dismayed to hear that the government is not going to agree to the terrorists' demands, and he fears for Mina.
Sophia is scared and wants her mummy, and Adam does what he can to reassure her. Sophia, who has difficulty showing affection for him, sits on his lap, and for the first time the little girl seems to welcome her father's love.
This is a very intense novel and I don't know how things are going to end. In the prologue a witness called saying that a plane had exploded and he didn't think that anybody could survive that, but I am hopeful that the criminals are caught and the passengers as well as MIna, Adam and Sophia survive.
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