Before The Fall explores the pasts and present of a private plane crash's passengers and survivors. It's told mostly from the point of view of the one adult survivor except when it explains life occurrences and backstories for the other passengers on the plane. We, as the reader, along with the survivors and the general public in the story don't know how or why the plane crashed, and I liked that. I thought it was a story of these seven passengers, their pasts, their flaws, what made them unique, what led them to this flight, how they knew each other (not in a Lost coincidence way, just how they'd met, etc.). It does a fine job of doing that. They are interesting enough characters, and you obviously feel for the child who survived and lost his family. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at some of the descriptions of the women characters' thoughts and behaviors, but what are you gonna do?
About 70% of the way through, you see the storylines converging, the FBI investigation, the Bill O'Reilly-type news host getting more and more screen-time (the book equivalent?). And then in the final pages you find what caused the crash. The reason is so dumb, so insensible that while you're given 300-something pages of this world that was constructed, you kind of regret reading it in the first place. To only explain the flight attendant and the co-pilot's chapters at the very end and then to show that the crash was caused by a SPOILER crazy co-pilot mad that a woman dissed him SPOILER is one of the dumber things I've read. Whether that's a comment on how random and ridiculous these events can sometimes be or on how crazy men can be doesn't matter because the book just ends with it. If it continued, I imagine that the same Bill O'Reilly-type would (after retracting his terrorism assumptions) sympathize for the still-drunk co-pilot who was sad that the woman he used to date didn't want to see him anymore.
