John J. Nance Books In Order

Kat Bronsky Books In Publication Order

  1. The Last Hostage (1998)
  2. Blackout (2000)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Final Approach (1990)
  2. Scorpion Strike (1992)
  3. Phoenix Rising (1994)
  4. Pandora’s Clock (1995)
  5. Medusa’s Child (1997)
  6. Headwind (2001)
  7. Turbulence (2002)
  8. Skyhook (2003)
  9. Fire Flight (2003)
  10. Saving Cascadia (2005)
  11. Orbit (2006)
  12. Lockout (2016)
  13. 16 Souls (2017)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Splash of Colors: The Self-Destruction of Braniff International (1984)
  2. Blind Trust: The Revolution in Aviation Safety – Coming to Grips with Human Failure (1986)
  3. On Shaky Ground (1988)
  4. What Goes Up: The Global Assault on Our Atmosphere (1991)
  5. Golden Boy: The Harold Simmons Story (2003)
  6. Why Hospitals Should Fly: The Ultimate Flight Plan to Patient Safety and Quality Care (2008)
  7. Charting the Course: Launching Patient-Centric Healthcare (2012)

Kat Bronsky Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

John J. Nance Books Overview

The Last Hostage

High above the Rocky Mountains, a routine airline flight becomes a midair standoff as 130 passengers listen to their captain relate the unprecedented demands of an unseen hijacker. Federal and state officials must hunt down, arrest, and indict the murderer of a young girl, and do it all in eight hours or the airplane will be blown out of the sky. With the airline in confusion, the media pursuing, and the hijacker forcing the aircraft into wild maneuvers as they head toward Salt Lake City, the FBI reluctantly fields its closest hostage negotiator, a rookie female agent and psychologist named Katherine Bronsky. Immediately, Bronsky finds herself sucked into the vortex of an impossible war of wills between a volatile, unstable hijacker holding the trigger to a bomb and stonewalling Justice Department officials who have no real intention of meeting the lone gunman’s demands. When the hijacker suddenly refuses to land at Salt Lake City, Kat commandeers a business jet and races after the low flying 737. As the jetliner runs low on fuel, she’s stunned to discover that the man with the gun is none other than the murdered girl’s father, and that one of his hostages is a front runner to become the new Attorney General of the United States. Successful at last in getting him to land in a remote Colorado airport, Bronsky’s brave and desperate attempts to reason with the hijacker backfire, and she becomes a hostage herself. Now discounted and ignored by her superiors in Washington for losing control, Bronsky’s only hope to save the passengers and crew of AirBridge Flight 90 is to solve the wrenching mystery of who killed an eleven year old girl in a dark Connecticut forest two years before. And for that, all she has is an airborne phone and precious few hours before the bomb detonates. Nance ratchets up the tension with expertly crafted twists and turns that converge into an unforgettably wrenching dilemma. But one thing finally becomes clear. The only person who can safely land AirBridge Flight 90 and save its 130 passengers is dangerously close to death. And if the clock runs out, The Last Hostage will never see the light of day.

Blackout

The master of the airplane thriller and bestselling author of Pandora’s Clock is back in his most harrowing adventure ever. Reviewers have called John J. Nance ‘a wonderful storyteller’Chicago Tribune who gives readers the kind of book they want: ‘so compelling it’s tough to look away’ People, ‘more addictive than morphine’ The Dallas Morning News, ‘the non stop read of your life’ Rocky Mountain News. As his new thriller Blackout begins, a Boeing 747 400 rises through a beautiful Hong Kong sunset on its way to Los Angeles. But within minutes, the plane is rocked by an explosion outside the cockpit that leaves one pilot dead and another blinded. The huge jet shudders through its descent while hundreds of passengers hold on for their lives. Kat Bronsky, an FBI agent and terrorism specialist, is assigned the hunt for a Global Express business jet seen nearby prior to the attack. Could the explosion have been a cruel twist of fate? Or could the phantom Global Express have employed some new kind of weapon? Bronsky tracks the Global Express crew across the Pacific to the American Northwest and a breathless, edge of the seat showdown.

Final Approach

SABOTAGE…
. ACCIDENT…
. OR MURDER BY OMISSION?
The airline told passengers flying to Kansas City the skies were safe. They lied. On a rain slashed night, Flight 255 crashes at Kansas City Airport triggering one of the most horrifying aviation disasters of the decade. Put simply, it never should have happened. Safety Board investigator Joe Wallingford races to find out why it did.

Scorpion Strike

‘Exciting.’UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONALIn the wake of Desert Storm, a defecting Iraqi scientist has revealed Saddam Hussein’s horrifying plans for a devastating counterstrike against his enemies…
and the world. With no time to spare, American forces must remobilize to locate and neutralize the underground laboratory where a lethal super virus is ready to be unleashed. But an eleventh hour disaster thrusts the entire mission into the hands of Air Force comrades in arms Colonel Will Westerman and Reserve Colonel turned commercial pilot Doug Harris. Flying into the heart of Iraqi power, they must depend on their skills and each other as never before, to complete a mission that looks more and more like a suicide run…

Phoenix Rising

WELCOME TO THE DEADLY SKIESPam Am Flight 10 is heading routinely from Seattle to Tokyo when one by one its engines explode. Only brilliant work by its pilot saves the 747 and the hundreds of passengers on board…
. At Pan Am headquarters, the newly revived airline is facing a serious setback rumors of financial uncertainty have panicked Wall Street and sent stock prices and bond ratings plummeting…
. At the airline’s maintenance facility, a mysterious intruder has left behind evidence of possible industrial sabotage…
. Since the new Pan Am has risen from the ashes of deregulation to challenge the big three U.S. airlines, nothing has gone smoothly. Now with threats from all sides, Pan Am’s chief pilot Brian Murphy, its new chief financial officer Elizabeth Sterling, and international financier Creighton MacRae must work together to save the beleaguered airline if their personal feelings don’t get in the way…
.’The Airport of the 1990s…
A superb novel.’ Library Journal

Pandora’s Clock

Captain James Holland is the pilot on a routine flight from Frankfurt to New York, packed with people eager to be home for Christmas. When a passenger collapses from what appears to be a heart attack, Holland is forced to request an emergency landing at London’s Heathrow Airport. But to his great surprise, the air traffic controllers will not let him land in England they tell Holland that his sick passenger has contracted a dangerous new form of influenza and that the plane must return to Germany. But when German officials also refuse the landing, and other European countries follow suit, Holland begins to suspect that he’s in much more trouble than anyone’s letting on. In fact, his sick passenger is carrying a deadly virus accidentally released from a Bavarian laboratory, and it is feared that everyone on board is now infected. At the same time, someone with access to the CIA’s computers wants to shoot the plane out of the sky, and there is a United States ambassador on board with powerful terrorist enemies who want to see him dead. While the panic on the ground spreads from the White House Situation Room to a small airport in the Ukrainian Republic, Captain Holland has only one concern: Where and when can he land?

Medusa’s Child

For thirty year old captain Scott McKay, the transport run from Miami to Denver will give him the money he desperately needs to keep his fledgling air cargo company flying. When a mysterious crate is discovered on his plane, however, McKay is ordered to abandon his present course and fly the crate and its owner, Vivian Henry, to Washington, D.C., before going to Denver. McKay takes the forced detour in stride until a strange noise comes from deep inside the crate. It is the voice of Vivian’s husband, Dr. Rogers Henry, warning that the shipment they are carrying is actually a fully armed Medusa device, a thermonuclear bomb that can destroy every computer chip over an entire continent, and blast the Silicon Age back to the Stone Age. And it is set to go off within hours. As panic spreads from the small community of nuclear scientists who used to work for Dr. Rogers Henry to the White House and eventually to the general public, a group of rogue military officers conspires to disobey the President’s orders and secure the technology of the Medusa device, whatever the cost. Will Captain McKay and his crew trust their own instincts to dispose of the bomb, or will they let a misguided government dictate their actions?

Headwind

An ex U.S. President evades his would be kidnappers aboard a Boeing 737 in this thrilling new skyborne novel by the bestselling author of Blackout. Athens, Greece. As a Boeing 737 noses into its gate, its crew is suddenly confronted by Greek officials waiting to arrest one of its passengers, a beloved ex president of the United States, John Harris. Believing Harris’s life is in danger, Captain Craig Dayton stages a daring escape by backing the jet away from the gate without clearance and taking off down a vacant runway. The dilemma for Captain Dayton and his precious cargo is that Peru has signed an Interpol Warrant for President Harris’s arrest, using the same treaty employed by Spain to extradite former Chilean dictator Pinochet. The Peruvian government alleges that Harris is personally responsible for a supposed CIA led strike against a biological weapons factory during his term of office. But Harris’s and the U.S. State Department’s nightmare is this: There is no place to hide because every nation in the Pan American federation has signed the treaty and any one of them must honor the warrant and give Peru what it wants: a presidential pawn to humiliate on the international stage. Captain Dayton flies Harris and his crew on an against the clock mission to find a safe haven from Greece to Sicily to Ireland while Harris’s rumpled and outgunned lawyer wrestles an international team of legal sharks snapping at their biggest prize yet. Headwind is another electrifying novel from ‘a wonderful storyteller’ Chicago Tribune whose ‘hand for crackling intensity remains peerless’ Kirkus Reviews.

Turbulence

The passengers of Meridian Flight 6 delayed for hours and mistreated by rude and inept airline personnel have been pushed to the edge. When Captain Phil Knight makes a forced emergency landing in war torn Nigeria, abandoning his copilot to certain death, violence erupts inside the airplane as the enraged passengers attempt the first ever commercial airline mutiny. But what they don’t know could kill them: The unscheduled loss of radio contact has led NATO and the CIA to believe they have been hijacked by terrorists and must be carrying a deadly chemical weapon into the heart of Western Europe. In the pressurized last moments as Flight 6 approaches, NATO scrambles to uncover the truth of the plane’s cargo, while Navy pilots bring the 747 into their gun sights and the lives of innocent passengers hang in the balance. Expert in flight details, a compelling cast of characters, and spine tingling action prove Nance once again to be ‘the king of the modern day aviation thriller’ Publishers Weekly.

Skyhook

John Nance’s reputation for nail biting suspense has grown steadily with bestsellers like Headwind, Blackout, and Pandora’s Clock. ‘A roller coaster ride’ New York Post, ‘a humdinger’ Los Angeles Times, and ‘so compelling it’s tough to look away’ People, sang critics nationwide. In Skyhook, Nance crafts another winner. The ‘boomerang box,’ a high tech computer program designed to save a plane experiencing flight trouble, is Dr. Ben Coles’s baby. After a test run over the Gulf of Alaska goes awry, he suspects someone has sabotaged the plane’s computer systems. And mysteriously, and almost simultaneously, April Rosen is horrified to learn that her father’s plane has narrowly escaped a midair collision over the same patch of sea. While Dr. Coles considers the uncomfortable notion that someone within his own company might wish him harm, Rosen begins her search for the cause of her father’s hair raising ‘near miss.’ But what both don’t know is this: their fears have a common source. They are being watched by people in the Pentagon, who believe that the two might stumble upon the secret that will destroy them all before Skyhook has a chance to succeed. What is Skyhook‘s real purpose? Is it commercial or military? And will its early implementation compromise the safety of fliers everywhere? In the hands of the talented John Nance, the race for the answers will leave you hanging on to your seat.

Fire Flight

From New York Times bestselling author and ‘master of the airborne thriller’ John J. Nance comes Fire Flight, a ripped from the headlines adventure about the extraordinary pilots who risk their lives flying substandard airplanes in a little known and lopsided war against our nation’s wildfires. Veteran pilot Clark Maxwell thought his fire bombing days were well behind him. But when Jerry Stein, Maxwell’s friend and airtanker fleet owner, calls at the height of the fire season to beg him to reenter the war, he doesn’t hesitate. A pair of ferocious forest fires is raging out of control, threatening to destroy Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and incinerate thousands of area homes. As the wildfires spread, whipped by massive winds, and the federal forces arrayed against the fires reach their limits, anxiety grows in the local population. A paranoia plagues the fire bombers and smoke jumpers as well, after a mysterious string of violent airborne accidents among the airtanker fleet claims the lives of some of the most fearless and experienced veterans. Maxwell has long argued that the airtankers old aircraft used by pilots to bomb the fires with fire re*tardant slurry are faulty museum pieces that should have been grounded years ago. Now some of the fleet seem to be falling apart in midair. In the middle of the area’s worst wildfire season in history, Maxwell is convinced that a sinister cover up is behind the rash of horrific air disasters. Were the planes’ inspection papers forged? Is someone capitalizing on these crashes? As he races to unravel a very real mystery and prevent a natural disaster of massive proportions, Maxwell’s probe reaches the upper levels of the very government agencies charged with mount ing the aerial fire fighting effort a move that for wholly unexpected reasons just may cost him his life…
and the life of Karen Jones, the married smoke jumper with whom he seems to have fallen in love. In amazing detail, with the signature authenticity only a veteran pilot could provide, John J. Nance creates a hair raising thriller that will leave readers breathless from cover to cover.

Saving Cascadia

A few hundred years ago, Cascadia Island didn t even exist. Like the Washington seacoast, it was rock submerged beneath the Pacific. A massive earthquake changed that, exploding the rock upward, making it land unstable land, according to seismologist Dr. Doug Lam. Lam has spent years researching the Cascadia Subduction Zone. He published a theory that the unrelieved tectonic strain beneath the idyllic landscape of Cascadia Island could be triggered with modern construction processes with catastrophic results. The paper was disregarded, even ridiculed, by his peers and by mega wealthy developer Mick Walker, who stands to earn millions from the construction of a luxury resort on Cascadia. The elegant casino, hotel, and convention center will reap millions for him even if the tiny island only lasts for a short time When a series of earthquakes begins to shake the Northwest Corridor, Doug’s worst fears are confirmed. In an attempt to convince Walker to evacuate Cascadia immediately, Doug hurries to join guests arriving for the resort s grand opening. As the tremors wreak havoc across the Northwest coastal area, the military is left with too few resources to assist the people on Cascadia. Convinced that the island will be in ruins within hours, Doug reluctantly calls upon his girlfriend, Jennifer Lindstrom, president of Nightingale Aviation a major medical transport helicopter company for help. With snow falling, visibility dropping, and winds increasing, Doug embarks on an impossible mission with Jennifer and Nightingale s helicopters to evacuate over three hundred people, while smaller earthquakes continue to herald the approach of a catastrophic tsunami. John J. Nance hurtles readers along a nail biting quest to rescue hundreds of stranded vacationers and resort staff. Meticulously researched, and with the signature authenticity only a veteran pilot could provide, Saving Cascadia is a hair raising thriller of awesome magnitude.

Orbit

In this ‘heart-pounding’ Seattle Post-Intelligencer aviation thriller, New York Times bestselling author John J. Nance ventures forward to 2009, taking readers on a riveting journey of life or death.

His once-in-a-lifetime chance

Disillusioned with his life, when Kip Dawson wins a passenger seat on one of American Space Adventure’s commercial spaceflights, it’s a dream come true. Although his acceptance of the prize strikes terror in his family, Kip sets off, ready for adventure. But a successful launch quickly morphs into chaos — a micrometeor punches through the wall of the spacecraft, leaving the radios as dead as the pilot.


becomes a global fight for survival.

With nothing to do but wait for death, Kip composes his epitaph on the ship’s laptop computer. Little does he know an audience of millions would soon discover his cries — sparking a massive rescue mission in his honor. With no idea the world can hear him, his heroism in the face of death may sabotage his best chance of survival.

Golden Boy: The Harold Simmons Story

In an age where business is too often seen as brutal combat devoid of ethics and human concern, the amazing story of Harold Simmons journey from bank trainee to one of the nation’s wealthiest, most successful corporate investors is an inspiring record of intelligence, honesty, and faith in the American system. It is also a fascinating trip through the byzantine realities of high corporate finance and corporate acquisition, and a validation of the idea that the true value of public companies can be discovered through nothing more than intellect, hard work, and public records. This is the story of Harold Simmons, whose journey from his home in Golden, Texas, has been on a path paved in gold. Written in the can t put it down style of best selling author John J. Nance.

Why Hospitals Should Fly: The Ultimate Flight Plan to Patient Safety and Quality Care

‘This book is a tour de force, and no one but John Nance could have written it. He, alone, masters in one mind the fields of aviation, health care safety, medical malpractice law, organizational sociology, media communication, and, as if that were not enough, the art of fine writing. Only he could have made sophisticated, scientifically disciplined instruction about the nature and roots of safety into a page turner. Medical care has a ton yet to learn from the decades of progress that have brought aviation to unprecedented levels of safety, and, in instructing us all about those lessons, John Nance is not just a bridge builder he is the bridge. This book should be required reading for anyone willing to face the facts about what it will take for health care to be as safe as it truly can be.’ Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP President and CEO Institute for Healthcare Improvement IHI

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