Just Finished Reading: Chasing The Sun by David Mace (FP: 1992) [454pp] 

Michael Tranter was riding high. The whiz kid computer programmer from only a decade ago had transformed his skill into a thriving business in High-Tech Security. Going from strength to strength he moving into the world of exotic holidays and had started his own airline complete with best-selling private planes. But then the Recession hit – Hard. The employment of a new CEO to look after his business empire allowed Michael to concentrate on what many saw as his ‘vanity’ project. In the face of growing economic trouble and worrying news from the Stock Exchange Michael was determined to plow ahead with his idea for a solo flight around the world. Going into full PR overdrive he proposed to have Ruth Clifford, his PR Manager and present lover, as his back-up pilot. But Michael never intended to use her in that role. Michael had other ideas – both for his company and for Ruth. But he never saw the accident coming. Grounded with a broken arm he was forced to watch Ruth take off on HIS round world trip. She was going to ruin everything... and then his new CEO discovered fraud, massive fraud. It was all starting to really fall apart. 

This was an odd one for me. I’d had it (like SO many others) for years sitting on a shelf gathering dust. I dug it out a few months ago whilst (rather inevitably) looking for something else and added it to a mini-stack of flight related novels. I picked this one (prompted by the ‘Air’ wildcard) because I thought it’d make a nice change from a military related flight novel. After a rather long and slow start I actually ended up quite liking this. The main protagonists – both Michael and Ruth – were not very nice or relatable people so I struggled with that aspect quite a bit. Ruth started to grow on me by the end but still proved to be more annoying than anything else. The new CEO, Robert Munro, was OK and generated a fair bit of admiration and sympathy as he tried to save Michael’s company from bankruptcy. My favourite character was the hyper PR person in charge of the media storm regarding the solo flight – Terri Sabuli – even if she harped on her racial disadvantages a bit too much for my liking. The novel only really ‘took off’ (pun intended!) along with the solo flight which was by far, at least for me, the most interesting part of the book. For the majority of the read I was convinced that this would get an overall rating of ‘reasonable’ or ‘OK’ but, at about the 2/3 mark, it all began to come together and turned out to be rather good by the time I turned the last page. What, at first, seemed to be a group of unrelated threads was woven into a clever plan, on Michael’s part, to get out of the company he built with money in hand before the whole thing crashed behind him. It was all quite ingenious looking down from 20,000 feet. Despite the fact that this hasn’t aged particularly well and that it demands patience for the first half of the book as the author builds the necessary foundations this ended as a better than average corporate world thriller with an interesting aerial twist for good measure. Recommended if you can find a copy.