Lynne Heitman: Tarmac

Penguin Publishing (Paperback), ISBN 0-451-41008-4

Terrorism, hijackings, airliners crashing into the World Trade Center — today you think of all these things when you think of the air travel business. Now, add one more concern. Thanks to Lynne Heitman’s latest novel Tarmac, travelers can worry about the lucrative world of black-market airplane parts. Used parts, harvested from defunct airplanes, crash sites, sometimes from automobiles, bring high profits for low investments. Investors forget about safety and think profit. They repair, repaint, retag and resell the parts, too often to the detriment of innocent passengers and crews.

Alex Shanahan, newly unemployed general manager of Logan Airport, packs up her apartment and prepares to start over in a little start-up airline in Detroit. But a package arrives that changes the course of her life.

The package starts her on a quest to Miami, Fla., where she fights to clear the name of her good friend John McTavish. In the process she unmasks his murderers and puts to rest any rumors that John ran drugs. John, the last of the white-hat heroes, stood up for Alex against his union buddies. Now Alex works to return the favor.

Unexpectedly, Alex finds help in the form of a courageous but not-too-successful P.I., Jack Dolan, and a barely pubescent part-time motel manager/full-time computer nerd. This misfit trio faces the black market ring and its sinister backers in a series of death-defying misadventures.

Few books draw me into a world so real I forget who, what, where and when of my own world. But in Tarmac Lynne Heitman, also author of Hard Landing, provides a realism based upon her 14 years of experience in the airlines business. The details enrich this book and provide insider information and descriptions that elevate it above the usual mass-market action adventure fare. Heitman creates complicated, multi-faceted characters participating in suspenseful scenes. These beautifully crafted scenes take original and unexpected twists, leaving readers breathlessly turning pages until the final showdown.

You’ll never look at the air travel industry the same way again.

Dawn Goldsmith

A multi-published writer of non-fiction and short stories, Dawn Goldsmith also reviews mass market books for Publishers Weekly and writes for a variety of publications including Christian Science Monitor.