One Second Away

Jessie and her husband, Vaughn, are divorcing. Living on opposite coasts and struggling to determine custody for their nine-year-old son, Dylan, they agree to have Dylan fly solo from LA to New York to visit Vaughn. The airline has is ready to accommodate him as an unaccompanied minor, and it’s all set for his grandparents to pick him up when he lands. With an AirTag in his backpack and location sharing on both his phone and watch, he takes off. Hours later at JFK, his grandparents tell Jessie they were diverted to another gate to pick him up, but it turns out the plane landed at the correct one. At the gate where Dylan landed, people who look like his grandparents pick him up and have the proper paperwork. When Jessie checks, the AirTag says he’s still in LA, but the tracking on his phone and watch say he’s still at the gate. Who would want to take Dylan? At the same time, a subway operator in Toronto sees green lights all the way to the next station and slams into a stationary car. The operator’s last words are, “The lights were green,” but the video footage shows only red lights. And this is only the beginning of this intense and fantastic thriller. Mofina’s compelling and twisty narrative builds suspense while playing with reader expectations. He takes a great plot and adds the human element so we care about the characters and what’s happening on every gripping page. Everyone should be one second away from snapping this up and adding it to their reading pile.—Jeff Ayers