Cross a road, take a train, or get on an airplane and you put your life in the hands of a stranger -- every bit as screwed up, every bit as fallible and as human as you are. Then the person turns out not to be a stranger at all, and suddenly it's much worse. In America and Britain and the sky in between, an apparently disparate group of people is connected, whether intimately or by chance, to the tragic death of a stowaway on board flight AF266. As the action veers across countries and time zones, the stowaway's real identity is revealed through stolen black box recordings, answering machine messages, sitcom outtakes, and court transcripts. Told in a shifting, circular narrative, the interwoven lives make up a jolting and layered puzzle that builds to a heart-stopping, chilling climax. An intelligent and invigorating novel with a bizarre menu of dysfunctional characters, Blackbox is the story of an attempt to erase a life on tape. Coincidences are cheap literary devices, and this novel relies on enough of them to fill a dollar store. Forget six degrees of separation; these disparate characters don't go beyond two degrees, even though they're split between London and New York. Just to follow one crazy thread: a depressed pilot randomly picks a New York therapist who just helped a woman commit suicide in London; meanwhile, a friend of the pilot returns to England only to meet the suicide's father and assist in his death. On it goes, desperate lives interweaving through a narrative more fanciful than any Harry Potter book. And whether they're unbalanced comedians or jinxed actors, the characters all speak with one loopy voice that keeps reminding us we're reading words on a page. Yet anyone willing to suspend disbelief is in for a clever, darkly humorous tale--narrated in 840 bite-size chunks by an omniscient ex-stewardess from inside the wheel well of a transatlantic flight. Although it's overly showy, this rumination on lost people longing for meaning packs quite a bittersweet punch. Frank Sennett Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Brilliantly developed…darkly comic.” - Independent (London) “[Walker] behaves as if he is enjoying himself enormously while writing this. The plot makes its revelations at such breakneck speed.” - The Times (London) “Truly unlike anything I’ve ever read before, with characters quirky enough for Carl Hiaasen, and a premise chilling enough for Michael Connelly.” - James Grippando, author of Last to Die Cross a road, take a train, or get on an airplane and you put your life in the hands of a stranger -- every bit as screwed up, every bit as fallible and as human as you are. Then the person turns out not to be a stranger at all, and suddenly it's much worse. In America and Britain and the sky in between, an apparently disparate group of people is connected, whether intimately or by chance, to the tragic death of a stowaway on board flight AF266. As the action veers across countries and time zones, the stowaway's real identity is revealed through stolen black box recordings, answering machine messages, sitcom outtakes, and court transcripts. Told in a shifting, circular narrative, the interwoven lives make up a jolting and layered puzzle that builds to a heart-stopping, chilling climax. An intelligent and invigorating novel with a bizarre menu of dysfunctional characters, Blackbox is the story of an attempt to erase a life on tape. Nick Walker is a writer and performer with Talking Birds,a UK mixed-media production company. He lives under aflight path in Coventry, England.