Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
Storming Heaven is Dale Brown’s 1994 fifth Patrick McLanahan novel and a sharp tonal shift for the series: instead of an external Air Battle Force opponent (the Soviets, the Iranians, the Lithuanians), the threat is a domestic-adjacent terrorist named Henri Cazaux, a French Foreign Legion pilot turned mercenary, who decides to use commercial aircraft and stolen ATC frequencies to attack American air-traffic-control infrastructure. McLanahan, recently retired into the Border Security Force, is pulled back in.
Brown got the procedural texture exactly right for 1994. The civil aviation material (FAA hierarchy, controller workload at SoCal Approach, the realistic limits of fighter intercept response time over densely populated airspace) is more carefully sourced than his usual hardware-porn passages. Cazaux is the best antagonist of the early McLanahan novels, with a credible operational doctrine and an actually scary endgame. The novel anticipates several uncomfortable post-9/11 concerns that no one outside Brown was thinking about in 1994. The McLanahan-Jon Masters subplot drags the middle third.
Recommended for Dale Brown readers who want the underrated middle-period McLanahan entries, and for anyone interested in books like Storming Heaven as pre-9/11 American aviation-terror fiction. Four stars, with the Cazaux POV chapters earning the rating on their own.
Related reads
If you liked Storming Heaven
Hammerheads
by Dale Brown
A Dale Brown 1990 technothriller about a militarized Drug War interdiction force. Pulpy, propulsive, very much of its moment.
Combat
by Dale Brown
Combat by Dale Brown 2001 review. A military-thriller anthology of original near-future war novellas from Dale Brown, Stephen Coonts, Larry Bond, and Harold Coyle.
The Lincoln Lawyer
by Michael Connelly
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly 2005 review. Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles defense attorney who works out of the back of a Lincoln Town Car, takes a case that pulls him into something larger. The novel that launched a series and a film franchise.
Big Little Lies
by Liane Moriarty
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty 2014 review. Three mothers at an Australian elementary school converge on a kindergarten Trivia Night where someone will die. The contemporary domestic-suspense novel that defined the late-2010s book-club shelf.
In the Woods
by Tana French
In the Woods by Tana French 2007 review. Dublin Murder Squad detective Rob Ryan is assigned to a child murder in the same woods where his two best friends disappeared twenty years earlier. The Edgar winner that launched the strongest contemporary literary-crime series.
Tell No One
by Harlan Coben
Tell No One by Harlan Coben 2001 review. A pediatrician receives an email containing a video clip of his murdered wife, eight years after her death. The single best Coben standalone and the one that defined the contemporary domestic-thriller register.
More by this author