The Last Flight Out: 3

Thirty thousand feet. A hold full of weapons. One U.S. Marshal who was never supposed to be aboard.Benjamin Walker has missed enough of his daughter's life. When his commercial flight out of Houston is grounded, he refuses to break the promise he made to attend her Curriculum Night in Vermont. With no available seat and no practical route that can get him home in time, he talks his way onto a Boston-bound 727 cargo flight.The ride is unofficial. The crew is small. The four other men aboard offer explanations that sound reasonable until Walker notices the tattoos, the rehearsed answers, and the way they watch the cargo hold.A broken seal exposes crates of weapons hidden inside a shipment that does not match its paperwork. Walker tries to warn the cockpit, but the response reveals a harder truth: at least one member of the flight crew is part of the operation. The men in back know he is asking questions. The aircraft is already in motion. And every advantage Walker normally relies on, backup, communications, safe fields of fire, disappears inside the narrow body of an aging jet.Walker is outnumbered, trapped, and responsible for keeping a damaged situation from becoming an airborne catastrophe. Not everyone aboard chose to be there, but finding the difference may be as dangerous as fighting them. Walker has to decide whom to trust, when to move, and how to take back a plane without bringing it down.The Last Flight Out is the third Benjamin Walker novel, a tense, self-contained aviation thriller that carries forward the series' emotional core: a lawman who can face almost any danger except becoming another promise his daughter learns not to believe.If you like the airborne suspense of T.J. Newman, the hard-edged rural heroes of C.J. Box, and the close-quarters pressure of a locked-room thriller, you'll enjoy The Last Flight Out.Board the flight, take your seat, and hold on. There is no safe way off.