For her second outing, Lawhon (The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress) once again reimagines a front-page news event, filling in the entertaining backstory with passion, secrets, and nail-biting suspense, this time taking on the disastrous crash of the Hindenburg in 1937. Using the actual passenger list from the doomed airship, the author has concocted a romance between two key crew members, Max Zabel, one of the ship's navigators, and Emilie Imhoff, the first German stewardess hired for an airship. Since the definitive cause of the Hindenburg's demise remains a mystery, Lawhon has conceived a plausible explanation that involves an act of revenge against one of the crew members, who, in World War I, flew the airship that bombed London and killed an American passenger's brother. The tale is fleshed out with other characters, including a lively acrobatic entertainer named Joseph Späh; a journalist, Gertrud Adelt, whose press credentials were recently revoked by the Nazis for her outspokenness; and the cabin boy, Werner Franz, whose trip on the Hindenburg was more of a passage to adulthood than he ever could have imagined. Lawhon threads many stories together, connecting passengers and crew and bringing behind-the-scenes depth and humanity to a great 20th-century tragedy-even though we all know the Hindenburg's fate. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

ON ITS DOOMED FLIGHT in early May of 1937, the silver-skinned zeppelin Hindenburg sailed 600 feet above the earth, from Frankfurt, Germany, to Lakehurst, N.J. Traveling at just under 80 miles an hour, carrying 97 passengers and crew, it would take four days on its trans-Atlantic voyage. From the ground, the Hindenburg must have been an astonishing sight - over 800 feet long, 135 feet wide, nearly 13 stories high. On its tail fins, huge black swastikas reminded the world that Nazi genius had created it. Within its rigid metal frame hung huge fabric bladders of combustible hydrogen, sufficiently capacious to lift its gargantuan mass into the sky. As Ariel Lawhon vividly writes in her new novel, "Flight of Dreams," they looked like the "giant inflated lungs" of a "sentient beast." There was also, ominously, a smoking room on one of the passenger decks, along with a lounge, a dining room, bar and sleeping quarters - all located inside the dirigible, not in a gondola below. Like the 1975 movie "The Hindenburg," "Flight of Dreams" makes use of the actual passengers on that last flight to populate its story. And like the film, the novel beautifully exploits the unique, excruciating kind of suspense in which the poor horrified reader knows from the start exactly what's going to happen. Well, maybe not exactly. Few people today believe the explosion of the Hindenburg as it attempted to dock was the result of sabotage; an electrostatic spark was the likely culprit. But as our own era makes only too clear, it's always possible to prefer conspiracy to fact. Almost at once, rumors began to spread: that a bomb had been detonated, that someone had fired a pistol, that an anti-Nazi agent had brought down Hitler's magnificent symbol of prestige. A novelist, of course, has no choice but to torment us with every possibility. Under Lawhon's revolving spotlight, we are introduced to a carousel of suspicious characters - the pair of erotically gymnastic journalists, the lovesick navigator, the half-Jewish stewardess, the traveler simply referred to as "the American." Some of the passengers, like the German family en route to Mexico, are drawn with historical accuracy. Others are given powerfully dramatic, completely fictional private lives, so as the zeppelin cruises serenely through the clouds the earthbound reader ricochets from distrust to uncertainty to outright foreboding. At every page a guilty secret bobs up; at every page Lawhon keeps us guessing. Who will bring down the Hindenburg? And how? But as we near the coast of America, Lawhon's prose begins to fly apart. The early sections of her novel have a few harmless mistakes and anachronisms (the Cologne cathedral is Gothic, not Baroque). At first her images are striking and original ("Gertrud takes a tiny sip" of the bartender's special cocktail "and can almost feel her hair blow back"). But when the pace quickens, clichés begin to appear and some images become bizarre ("Her ears are tuned to the deep, furious hum emanating from Max's chest behind her"). As the flight continues, Lawhon's "delete" key seems to have stopped working: "Emilie is serious. Seriously angry. Seriously ashamed. Seriously confused. Yes. All these things." Emotions are printed out like directives from Western Union: "Panic. Paranoia. Fear." The story ends, however, as it should. Both reader and airship pause for one terrible moment as the sky turns suddenly to "liquid gold" and the titanic Hindenburg "shatters into ocher and flame." MAX BYRD'S most recent novel is "The Paris Deadline."

The keening eyewitness account of the Hindenburg conflagration seared an irrevocable collective memory: "Oh, the humanity!" That same humanity forms the core of Lawhon's fictionalized account of the giant luxury zeppelin's final journey by focusing on some of the real people ensnared in its fate. Lawhon (The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress) researched biographical profiles, the ship's manifest, photographs, film footage, eyewitness accounts, and inquiry transcripts to incarnate actual passengers and crew, interweaving awe-inspiring fact with suspenseful story-telling. In the spirit of Walter Lord's A Night To Remember, the countdown ticks away as the pride of Nazi Germany's fleet glides toward destruction, inspiring the listener to wonder: What or who will trigger the inevitable? John Lee evokes the gravity of a radio announcer in pre-World War II Europe. VERDICT Fans of romance, historical mystery, and true disasters will be ensnared by this novelization of a real event. ["The clever banter, elaborate plot twists, and period detail will be appreciated by lovers of historical fiction": LJ 11/15/15 review of the Doubleday hc.]--Judith -Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An Agatha Christie-style page-turner exploring the unsolved mystery of the 1937 Hindenburg explosion. As Lawhon (The Wife, the Maid and the Mistress, 2014) charmingly explains in her Author's Note at the end of this novel, "If you're going to call bullshit on historical events, you'd best have a good theory to offer as an alternative." What she questions and upends in her speculative version of what happened between the takeoff of the Hindenburg from Frankfurt, Germany, on May 3, 1937, and its disastrous landing three days later in Lakehurst, New Jersey, is the assertion made by survivors that it was "an uneventful flight." Building on a dense scaffolding of biographical and historical fact, Lawhon invents personalities and relationships for key passengers, chooses from the extant theories about what caused the fire, and spins it all into a web of airborne intrigue. Each section is labeled for a different character. "The Stewardess" is Emilie Imhoff, a capable and lovely young widow who's beginning to return the devoted affections of "The Navigator," Max Zabel. "The Journalist" is Gertrud Adelt. She's traveling with her much older husband, her press card has recently been revoked by the Nazis, and she's missing her baby son terribly, but she's distracted from her worries by suspicions of a bomb threat as well as by a scheming, sketchy character called "The American." Then there's the adorably awkward 14-year-old "Cabin Boy," Werner Franz, whose many responsibilities include taking care of a mysterious unclaimed dog kept in a crate in the cargo hold. Werner's budding romance with a passenger his age is one of the plotlines that amps up the anxiety about who will be among the 62 who survive the explosion and who among the 35 killed. As the disaster inches closer with every chaptereach begins with a countdown in days, hours, and minutesLawhon evokes the airborne luxury of the shipthe meals, the cocktails, the smoking room, and the servicein such detail that you end up feeling a little sad that the stately flight of the Hindenberg marked the end of passenger travel by airship forever. A clever, dramatic presentation of a tragic historical event. Suspenseful and fun. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.