It’s Delightful, It’s DeMille
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Okay. Here’s my challenge: Name a writer of big, best-selling thrillers who is better than Nelson DeMille. His first book (skipping a bunch of paperback originals he produced while he was learning to write) was “The Rivers of Babylon” (1978), followed by “The Talbot Odyssey” (1981), but it was with “Word of Honor” (1985) that I discovered him. I still regard it as the best courtroom novel ever written, challenged only by “Anatomy of a Murder” and, until it’s credulity-challenging ending, “Presumed Innocent.”
He has been a fixture at or near the top of best-seller lists ever since, and few authors deserve it more. “Gold Coast,” “The Charm School,” and “The General’s Daughter” (successfully filmed with John Travolta a few years ago) show Mr. DeMille at the top of his game. With “Plum Island” he introduced a terrific protagonist, John Corey, a smart-mouth New York cop who made a return appearance in “Lion’s Game.”
Which brings us to the new book, “Night Fall” (Warner, 499 pages, $26.95). I’m pretty sure I mentioned, on one or two occasions, that a certain book was my favorite of the year. I take it back. Hands down, this relentlessly captivating novel is the most fun I had this year that did not involve my wife.
Much of the novel is based on fact. In July 1996, TWA Flight 800, bound from JFK to Paris, crashed in Long Island Sound, killing all 230 people on board. A lengthy and apparently thorough investigation concluded that a mechanical failure – a frayed wire that set off a spark that caused fumes in a fuel tank to explode – caused the accident. This official conclusion remains in place, in spite of the fact that more than 200 eyewitnesses swear they saw a white streak of light head directly toward the 747 just before the explosion lit the summer sky. The government position on this is that it was an optical illusion, shared by each and every one of those witnesses.
All of the above is true. Mr. De-Mille, in the person of Corey, now a contract investigator for the FBI, reopens the case in the summer of 2001, five years after the disaster, when he attends a memorial service for the victims. His wife, Kate Mayfield, who works for the FBI, is assigned to the investigation and becomes personally involved with some of the families of the victims. Not entirely convinced that the government findings are accurate, she induces her husband to have a look.
Corey learns that a married couple (well, married, but not to each other) had an X-rated tryst on the beach on the fateful night and memorialized the event by videotaping themselves engaged in activities that did not involve frisbees or sand castles. Inadvertently, they taped the horrific events in the sky behind them.
This is when it gets dicey. He is warned off the case by the FBI and the CIA and is sent to Yemen to teach him the consequences of meddling. Naturally, this convinces him that there has been a cover-up, and this spurs him to further action when he gets back from what he regards as an armpit of a country.
Speaking of which, this might be a good time to point out that Mr. De-Mille is not fanatically politically correct. If you are easily offended, you might prefer a nice, safe, little book in which the vicar (or his cat) solves the crime. In one scene, the frustrated Corey has a conversation with a taxi driver named Abdul, who allows that it is possible the attack was perpetrated by the Israelis, who tried to make it look like it was the Arabs. He claims the same thing for the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
“The Federal government, and all its employees,” Corey says, “is very sensitive to the rights and feelings of all minorities, recent immigrants, Native Americans, puppy dogs, forests, and endangered species of slime mold. I, on the other hand, lack this sensitivity, and my level of progressive thinking is stuck somewhere around the time when police regulations were rewritten to prohibit beating confessions out of suspects.”
This should let you know who you’re dealing with. Corey is equally sensitive about personal relations. It is clear that he hated Ted Nash, a CIA operative apparently killed in the line of duty, who went out with Kate before they were married. Kate follows orders and refuses to talk to her husband about her 1996 investigation, telling him she didn’t even discuss it with Nash, who also was on the investigating team.
Corey tells her, “I’m going to call him.”
“He’s dead, John,” she replies.
“I know,” he says. “I just like to keep hearing it.”
“Night Fall” is essentially a police procedural, and much of that work is tedious, searching for the tiniest clues in the least likely places. In the hands of a less skilled writer, these interviews and hours of slogging through boxes of documents could have been as thrilling as a list of great punch lines from the work of Susan Sontag. I don’t think there was a single page, however (and there are a lot of pages), that lacked humor, poignancy or a sense of chilling unease.
“Night Fall” is a thriller, dealing with the possibility that this was an early and successful terrorist attack on America, which for unknown reasons was covered up by the CIA and FBI.
It is also almost as a private-eye book, with the ex-cop/current FBI contract investigator working largely as a lone wolf, outside the law, just a private investigator would.
And it is a book that irritated me. I truly couldn’t stop reading. Finally, I turned the lights off at 3 a.m. At 3:15, I turned them back on and finished reading at 5:30. Mr. DeMille, I’m walking around like a refugee from “Night of the Living Dead” and I hold you personally responsible for anything I mess up today.
Mr.Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.