Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed. Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.
Moriarty seems to delight in conjuring up the fallout from this gray-haired agent of chaos while also exerting complete authority over her audience. Her pattern is to present readers with a puzzle or two, which they will piece together, chapter by chapter, only to have the whole thing swept off the table with one solid twist ... In the end, the puzzle — will the predictions come true or won’t they? — becomes less interesting than the myriad ways people react when confronted with their ephemerality ... Her conclusions aren’t obvious, and they don’t necessarily give readers what they want, but they do induce a sense of sanguinity — an exhale of relief that the world makes sense. Or Moriarty’s world, anyway.
Moriarty’s signatures are still reassuringly present, if somewhat diluted across these pages: her way of conjuring believable characters from a few short sentences — they may be archetypes, but they’re well-drawn ones — and the gentle humor and unshowy emotional intelligence that undergirds it ... As easily as it goes down, though, “Here One Moment” too often misses the tug and wallop of a good, taut thriller. In a way, the book itself feels like a generous sketch, less a fully realized novel than a work in progress still searching for its final form.
Feels disappointingly orderly ... This book has a paint-by-numbers feel. For a book with such a macabre premise, it is disappointing that the end result is best described as beige.
