Noah Hawley's Before the Fall

The universe is filled with things that don't make sense.
--Noah Hawley, Before the Fall, Hachette, 2016

I read Noah Hawley's book because I was impressed with the two seasons of Fargo he wrote, though admittedly I did not care as much for the other TV work he has done.  An important theme of the Fargo episodes he wrote is the arbitrary timing of how things happen and their consequences.  This theme is carried over in Before the Fall, about the crash of a small plane, with two survivors from the passengers and crew.  This novel was recently awarded the Edgar for best novel of the year and it makes one wonder what the competing books were like (I haven't read any of them at this point), as Before the Fall reads like a decent outline for a possibly interesting TV series:  an artist gets on the plane at the last minute, with a bunch of rich people, and survives the crash, while rescuing  a four-year-old boy.  The authorities get involved and, of course, so does the media.  Conspiracy and terrorist theories fly until it turns out that the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane because the flight attendant rejected his advances.

Red herrings abound, as they do in too many examples of so-called "suspense" and "mystery" novels, in order to distract and manipulate the reader.  Hawley does a decent job of going back to the lives of those in the crash, though only the survivors come across as successful characters.  "Before the fall" of course refers to a prelapsarian time when things were supposedly idyllic but for most of us --and certainly for the characters in this book -- no such time actually exists.