Thriller set in Manhattan
Thriller set in ARGENTINA
30th January 2025
Death Flight by Sarah Sultoon, thriller set in ARGENTINA.
The backdrop to this novel is Argentina’s Dirty War, which I first read about in Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case by Elsa Ducaroff (TRS: Slava Faybysh and David William Foster) and therefore it was interesting to pick up Death Flight given my newly acquired awareness of the times. From 1976-1983 a military junta ruled Argentina and 1000s of people were made to disappear. One of the ways of disposing of the mutilated bodies was on the death flights, they were simply dropped into the ocean so that the water could do its work, the evidence of terrible deeds obliterated. Occasionally evidence of “The Disappeared” would wash up on the shoreline.
It is now 1998 and and Jonny Murphy is in Buenos Aires reporting for the International Tribune. He is interviewing families of the victims and is working in conjunction with freelance photographer Paloma Glenn. A body is found on the shoreline, an echo from the dark past, but years have passed since the end of the Dirty War, so what does this body now signify?
Robbed and snatched off the street at gunpoint, Jonny finds himself in dialogue with one of erstwhile pilots, which for him could be a real scoop, but he soon discovers that at present he has little say on what he can and can’t report. He is resourceful and he will not be silenced and continues with his investigations against all odds. He follows a trail into the heart of the country.
This is a deftly told story, with a terrific sense of pace and edginess. It offers background and political insight (the USA backed the war, for example, and although many Catholics were persecuted, the church itself remained silent), and the pathos grows as the contemporary Argentinian financial crisis develops. There is a real sense of a country still at that point – to some extent – at war with itself, and the author slides her characters into a fully textured backdrop. There is a real sense of urgency in the novel that this particular period of Argentinian history should be brought to the attention of readers.
This is no. 2 in the Jonny Murphy files but can happily be read as a standalone.
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