When a blizzard grounds all commercial flights taking off in Salt Lake City two strangers, Dr. Ben Payne and Ashley Knox (whose wedding is in two days), decide to split the fare for a private charter plane into Denver. Unfortunately the pilot, Grover, suffers a heart attack and crashes into the mountains; while he is able to adjust for some impact before he dies the emergency beacon is still destroyed on impact.
Oh and they didn’t file a flight plan or tell anyone they were getting on the plane in the first place.*
So no one is looking for them and Ashley’s leg is badly injured from bashing it into a rock on impact. Luckily Ben is essentially a super hero in scrubs. A lot of the plot revolves around Ben being an expert mountain climber who had been climbing the week prior and therefore had a lot of his gear with him when the charter plane crashed. Oh and Grover always flew with a hunting bow and fishing gear because of course. Unfortunately they have no food, are in the middle of nowhere and it is continuing to snow several inches each day. Despite the unrealistic aspects of Ben’s talent for getting them out of danger I enjoyed this part of the plot because it was interesting and essentially what I signed up for.
“Never make it without the compass. In the trees, I’d lose all sense of perspective. Direction. Maybe life is like that.”
I did not enjoy the bullshit subplot with Ben and his wife. The plot device of giving the reader the information about Ben, his wife and their history together through messages he was recording for her felt very awkward and clunky. Personally I wasn’t invested in their relationship because it seemed secondary to the survival story playing out in the foreground.
It was made even worse by the big reveal at the end.
“I had to let her go. She’s not coming back. The distance is too great. The mountain between us is the one mountain I cannot climb.
Overall I enjoyed about 50% of this book but I don’t know if I enjoyed it enough to recommend it to you based on how much I loathed the other 50%.
*This really annoyed me because even if no one knew they had gotten on the charter plane a prominent surgeon from Florida disappeared after his flight was cancelled in Utah. He used a credit card to charter a plane. The man who pilots said charter plane has also disappeared. So sure, maybe Ashley’s friends thought she had cold feet about her wedding but the clues as to Ben and Grover’s whereabouts seemed a little more obvious!