Brace for the ultimate plunge!

The seemingly invincible Air Force One suffers a catastrophic engine failure. When it plummets into the Atlantic with the U.S. President and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff aboard, the world dives toward a peace-shattering crisis.
Enter Miranda Chase, the high-functioning autistic air-crash genius, and her extraordinary NTSB team. Faced with an impossible deep-sea salvage operation of the 747, Miranda must rely on her unparalleled intellect and her diverse the fiercely loyal Holly, methodical Mike, brilliant Jeremy, and resilient Andi, along with the enigmatic Taz.
This meticulously researched, hard-hitting, and suspenseful thriller unveils a deep-seated conspiracy that threatens global stability and challenges the team’s very definitions of loyalty and survival. Can Miranda’s and the team’s skills help them survive exposing the truth before the world unravels?
(Can be read stand-alone or in series.)
"Miranda is utterly compelling!" - Booklist, starred review“Escape A. Five Stars! OMG just start with Drone and be prepared for a fantastic binge-read!” -Reading Reality

My Review:

The story kicks off with a bang, and a whimper, and a plummet toward disaster – all at the same time. Miranda Chase, on her honeymoon, gets a call from a dead man. Not a recording, not a premonition, not a ghost. Instead, an acknowledgement that the die has already been cast and there’s nothing that anyone can do to turn back the clock.

Air Force One, with the President, the First Lady, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff aboard, is going down after a catastrophic failure of all four engines, over the Atlantic Ocean, 200 miles off the Eastern Seaboard. The plane will not reach shore, and everyone aboard knows it. General Drake Nason can’t stop it, and neither can Miranda Chase.

But Nason can give his friend Miranda one final order. To do what she does best, and figure out who killed them. Because it wasn’t pilot error, and it wasn’t mechanical failure. It was clearly sabotage, and Miranda is the best in the business at figuring out who or what caused a crash.

She already knows that this time it’s definitely not a ‘who’, and she’s determined to solve this crash, wherever the investigation takes her and her team – along with all of those mourning for those they lost.

The meat of this story is, as has always been fantastically true in this series, the recovery of the plan and the investigation of the crash. The recovery is a true nail-biter, as the seas are rough and the plane is in a precarious position. The wrong move, or merely a change in the weather, will send the downed jet to the bottom of the Atlantic. Wind and waves don’t care that Miranda and her team need every scrap of debris to figure this one out. But the Coast Guard does deliver – with only a bit of damage to their ships.

Which highlights one of the terrific things about this series. Not just that Miranda and her team are the best at what they do, but that the people who surround them are also the best at what THEY do. It’s always a pleasure to read about excellent people doing their jobs excellently while facing challenges that test them to their limits.

Once the plane has been secured, it’s not a difficult job at all to figure out the ‘what’ of this crash. With all the pieces of the puzzle, the method used to crash the plane is obvious.

But Miranda doesn’t do the ‘why’ of crashes. She’s not good with human factors, and motivation is all about human factors. It’s up to her team to figure out the ‘who’ in whodunnit, with the help of the allies and frenemies around the world that they have made and saved over the years.

That the last pieces of the puzzle come from the most unlikely of sources, who need to be rescued in the most bizarre and dangerous of ways, is a typically atypical part of the chills and thrills that have kept this reader on the edge of her seat for six years and now sixteen books in the series.

This final chapter in Miranda Chase’s saga turned out to be a somewhat sad but ultimately fitting ending for a tremendous series. It’s been a glorious ride, every step and book of the way. I just wish it wasn’t over.

Escape Rating A: I’ll start with this. The blurb is a bald-faced lie. Not the whole thing, just the ending. Because whoever had the bright idea that this FINAL book in this compelling AND complex long-running series can be read as a standalone, well, I can’t even with that because it’s just not true. At all.

For this reader, the fact that the books in this series are intertwined and build on each other was part of the point of the whole thing. Also part of the reason I started this last book, set it aside for 24 hours, and then went back because it took that long for my need to know how the rest of it ended to win its struggle with my need not to go through the depths of grief right along with the characters.

In a long running series like the Miranda Chase series, part of what keeps me coming back book after book, isn’t just the pulse-pounding plot. It’s about the characters. I return, over and over, because I want to see how they’re doing, how their world is doing, AND exactly what kind of mess they’ve gotten into this time around.

This book STARTS with the dramatic, catastrophic loss of three of the important secondary characters, and it’s a loss that resonates throughout the story and even afterwards. As much as this is the investigation to end all investigations – literally – and as much as the motives display so much of the author’s uncanny prescience about events in the real world that are a bit too close to the plot of the book, it’s the grief of all the characters that drips from every page.

A lot of series endings, at least for this reader, fall into the gulf between crying because it’s over but smiling because it happened. I’m still stuck at the crying part. This series ender wraps up what it needs to wrap, and marks a point in the lives of the characters where it is right and proper that this chapter of their lives comes to a close, but I’d have personally preferred a more unequivocally happy ending. It is as triumphant as I’d ever hoped, but that triumph is muted by loss. Which may be the way of the world but it’s that world I come to books to escape from for a bit.

That’s not to say that the story of Miranda Chase’s last investigation for the NTSB isn’t an absolute page-turner of a thrill ride, because it definitely is. As has been every single book in this series, starting with Drone. But be warned, that the more deeply you get into this series – and I promise you will – and the more you fall in love with Miranda and her ‘Scooby gang’, the harder it will be to see it end.

With the rising threat of Russia, Sweden joins NATO for its own protection. But someone wants to make them pay—in blood. Sweden’s home-built, world-class jet fighters, the Saab JAS 39E Gripen—named for the mythological Gryphon—are falling out of the skies. The stability, the very existence of NATO could be torn apart, as if trapped in the Gryphon’s mighty eagle claws. Can Miranda’s team of air-crash investigators solve the crisis before the powerful lion-half shreds them asunder?

My Review:

Like all of the previous entries in the Miranda Chase series from the very first page in Drone, Gryphon is an edge-of-the-seat political technothriller with World War III looming over every action on every page.

What makes this OMG FOURTEENTH book in the series stand out is that this is the one where all of the hyper-competent people that we have come to know and love over the course of the series so far are anything but.

Not that they don’t still manage to get the job done – because of course they do! – but rather because it’s clear from the opening page that all of the members of Miranda’s team are broken after the events of Osprey – and Miranda herself is the most broken one of them all.

It’s hard to lead anyone anywhere when your heart, your soul and your entire psyche are lying in pieces on the ground at your feet.

But time, tide, plane crashes and international catastrophes wait for no one. Even if not a single one of Miranda’s team remotely has their shit together, between them they still have enough to figure out exactly which enemy is responsible for the recent series of disasters plaguing Sweden’s civilian and military aviation.

Although Sweden doesn’t have a whole lot of enemies. Which doesn’t make Ian Fleming’s old truism any less true, that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” It’s just that this time around they’ll have to start by identifying just who they have to stop.

Escape Rating A: Gryphon is a hard read for fans of Miranda Chase and her team. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a good read, because it oh-so-definitely is. But rather, it’s hard to see people that we’ve come to like and respect and care about act this observably broken.

It’s a heartbreaking response to the events of the previous book, but damn it hurts to watch.

But it does make it easy for someone, actually a few someones, to slip a whole lot of things past them all – because they are all very much NOT at the top of their respective games. More like at the bottom.

The crisis is a conundrum, because it only makes sense in bad ways. Either the Swedish aviation industry is having the worst luck in the universe, over and over, or someone is out to get them. And yet, the usual suspects are all quiet.

And on the third hand being held behind someone’s back, considering the current crisis in the Ukraine, blaming Russia for everyone’s troubles is a damnably easy conclusion to jump to. So it becomes a question of whether Russia has faked out literally everyone – or whether someone else is trying to make it look that way in the hopes of, what? Causing World War III? Who is crazy enough to want to ring that bell?

A question which, in its own way, is at the center of what makes this series so damn good. Because both the question and the solution in each entry in the series isn’t about the techno part of the thriller. It’s always about the human factors. Technology may make the events and crises and calamities and near-catastrophes possible, but it’s always human beings who set them into motion for all too human reasons.

And it’s the humans of Miranda’s team – pulling together and putting it all together – that have to stop the worst from happening.

Not that the tech isn’t fascinating and not that we don’t get a lot of it while following Miranda and her team – but it’s the humans we feel for and with and it’s the human cost of the disaster they’re trying to prevent that make us keep turning pages until they pull literally everyone’s fat out of whatever particular fire they’re facing this time around.

And all of that is just, well, harder in Gryphon because the humans on all sides of this particular equation are all broken, The villains are broken because the game they are playing is not worth the cost, and the ‘good guys’ are broken because they’ve been pulling separately instead of pulling together, so they’re a mess and getting messier by the day.

Whether the radical solution they come up with to begin to start fixing their broken places is something that we’ll all get to find out in the next book in this awesome series, Wedgetail. Until that comes out this summer, we’ll all just have to hope right along with the rest of the team.