Fly By Night by Ward Larsen
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 9:00PM 
Published by Oceanview on November 1, 2011
An ultra-secret CIA drone disappeared somewhere in the vicinity of Somalia. Word is the recovered aircraft is hidden in a hanger in Sudan. Rather conveniently, a Sudanese aircraft has just disappeared, presumably crashed; rather improbably, the United States has been asked to assist Sudan in the accident investigation, giving the CIA a chance to poke around in search of its missing drone. NTSB investigator Jammer Davis (last seen in Fly By Wire) is recruited to do the poking. The Sudanese airline that Davis investigates, like the suspicious hanger, is owned by an imam who has close ties to a member of the Sudanese military. Too predictably, the bad guys have a mission of violence in mind for the salvaged drone. The target of that mission, however, isn't the sort of target I expected; that aspect of the plot is rather clever. As Davis tries to find a way inside the hanger, he becomes intrigued by fate of the crashed Sudanese aircraft, particularly when evidence begins to suggest that it didn't crash at all.
The characters in Fly By Night are less interesting than the story. Davis is a fairly standard one-note action hero; efforts to humanize him with a daughter who won't return his calls and a beautiful Italian doctor who manages to drink pinot noir with him in Sudan are uninspired. The bad guys are caricatures of evil.
Ward Larsen's writing style is workmanlike. He adds authenticity to the story by including overwhelming detail about the science of aviation and crash investigation. At times, he goes overboard; whenever he finds an opportunity to add a flying metaphor or to give the reader a pilot's outlook on life, he takes it. Too often Larsen's prose comes across as a lecture. Occasionally the tone is a bit smug.
Notwithstanding the ordinariness of its characters and despite its occasional predictability, Fly By Night is a satisfying read, both as a puzzling mystery and as a competent action story. It's a light read that doesn't demand (and likely wouldn't withstand) deep thought.
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