Fasten your seatbelt for this thriller

Free Fall

Rick Mofina Mira

Automated travel is a wonderful thing. Giant airplanes, for example, fly thousands of miles governed by a computer system.

Pilots have to be able to assume the helm if something goes wrong, but for the most part, a plane ride is a routine thing.

And now auto manufacturers are building computer-controlled cars that drive themselves. These technologies have enormous potential benefits for safety.

But what if we can’t control the machine? What then? How terrifying would it be to be on board a plane that is out of control or in a car on a superhighway that suddenly comes under someone else’s power?

You’d be in Free Fall, Rick Mofina’s latest thriller.

This one features the intrepid reporter Kate Page, who is in the newsroom of the wire service she works for on a weekend when a passenger jet inexplicably and terrifyingly plunges toward the ground, endangering the lives of all aboard.

The quick-witted Kate starts working the story and gets a tantalizing clue. Over the newsroom radio scanner she hears someone say that the plane just started acting on its own.

Initially, every expert believes it is pilot error or a mysterious weather condition known as clear air turbulence, which is virtually undetectable.

But, eventually, it becomes more and more obvious that someone with malicious intent has figured out a way to hack an airliner and put hundreds of people at risk.

Then the hunt is on for the bad guys, with Page winging from New York to London to California on the trail of a very big story, little realizing that she herself has become a target of two terrorist hackers.

You had better have your seatbelt fastened for the final confrontation of this one as the FBI tracks down and closes in on the hackers as their plan is about to come to fruition, all with Kate Page on board, literally.

Mofina, the Ottawa-based writer, has always been able to spin a yarn.

His stories race along and this one is no different. What makes this book one of his best is the sophistication of the plot and its relevance to right now, when no matter how sophisticated we are, how complex our technology is and how secure our systems are, we are vulnerable.

And that’s a scary thought.