"Missing in Flight" is Underwhelming and Unoriginal

Missing in Flight by Audrey J. Cole

Amazon First Reads February 2025

Pages: 279 Genre: thriller

Rating: 2 Stars

Kindle Highlights

Makayla Rossi is on a flight from Anchorage to New York with just her three-month-old, Liam. Eventually she has to run to the bathroom, and when she gets back, the bassinet is empty and Liam is gone. They've 30,000 feet in the air, but Liam is nowhere to be seen. As the investigation progresses, questions of Makayla's mental stability are brought forward when no one on the plane can recall actually seeing Liam board with her. No one is there to help her, since her husband is back in New York, so Makayla is on her own to find her son.

I was not into this book from the beginning. While I thought the concept sounded interesting (it was falsely advertised to me as a "locked room mystery"), it was very poorly executed. And when I was complaining to my mom about how crazy this book was, she informed me that it sounded a whole lot like the movie "Flightplan." Now, I've never watched this movie, but I read the description, and I do think the author took a decent amount of inspiration from that movie.

Anyone who tries to call this a locked room mystery is lying to you. Sure, the plane would be considered a locked room, but it's not a mystery. Nothing is really solved on the plane, and I'd argue the "investigation" is the most poorly handled part of the entire book. There is a very obvious misdirect that takes up about half the book (pretty much until the thing is solved), but the book is also not fully committed to this. Ultimately, it just makes everyone clueless rather than just wrong. The interpersonal conflict (outside of "where is Liam") was just never fully realized.

I also really did not like Makayla, which is bad since she's the main character. But I really struggled with this, because obviously Makayla is an incredibly panicked mother in a horrible situation. But instead of coming across as sympathetic she just seemed mean and unnecessarily erratic. She repeatedly got mad at the flight crew for their very reasonable, safety-related requests that were not hindering the investigation at all, which got very old very fast. She would also accuse everyone for any slight misstep while also justifying all of her actions, some of which were really bad. Maybe this isn't fair of me, but I found it really hard to root for her when she seemed determined to make things worse every step of the way.

Besides Makayla, there are actually three other people who narrate the story: Anna (one of the pilots), Tina (an FBI agent investigating Liam's disappearance on the ground), and Jack (Makayla's husband, who is at their home in New York). Jack was obviously very involved in the story, and, with the exception of some writing quirks that carried throughout the book, was a good inclusion. Anna and Tina, though, were really weak. I didn't care about their own personal stories, and I don't think their POV added much to the story of Liam's disappearance. I think it would've been better to take out their chapters and instead really focus on Makayla and Jack. This would've allowed their stories to be fuller, since their backstories were fairly surface-level. It also would've increased the tension by limiting our knowledge to the investigation as Jack is following it on the ground and Makayla is following it on the plane, especially since each angle of the investigation already centers around the perspective person.

There were quite a few writing quirks in this book that I didn't love, but weren't entirely condemning. The biggest problem was how repetitive the book was. Whole phrases were repeated across just a few paragraphs, and most of Makayla's chapters were indistinguishable from one another. It made the book incredibly tiresome to read and really emphasized every character or plot flaw.

I was really disappointed by this book. Unfortunately, there was nothing in it that I felt really attached to. It was the same scenes over and over, none of the characters were particularly good people, and the whole thing just felt hollow.