Worst Case Scenario

• Author: T.J. Newman
• Genre: Thriller
• Publication Date: August 13, 2024
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown & Company for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

Following her explosive debut thriller Falling and its harrowing follow-up Drowning, #1 internationally bestselling author T.J. Newman is back with Worst Case Scenario.

When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications.

The International Nuclear Event Scale tracks nuclear disasters. It has seven levels. Level 7 is a Major Accident, with only two on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a Level 8. Until now.

In this heart-stopping thriller, ordinary people—power plant employees, firefighters, teachers, families, neighbors, and friends— are thrust into an extraordinary situation as they face the ultimate test of their lives. It will take the combined courage, ingenuity, and determination of a brave few to save not only their community and loved ones, but the fate of humanity at large.

After eagerly reading Newman’s first two books, I couldn’t wait to get to this one. The fact that it was a departure from the strictly plane-based setting was one of the things I was most interested in seeing, because honestly, how many nightmare plane scenarios can we read without having an impact on the travel industry? Also, I was approved for the audiobook version of this, narrated by Joe Morton, and these seem like just the right kind of story to be read in audio format.

The action starts immediately in this book. It starts out with the pilot having a massive, fatal heart attack at 35,000 feet, while the copilot is in the lavatory. The plane crashes into a nuclear power plant in rural Minnesota, creating an immediate catastrophe of immense proportions. Part of the power plant is damaged, and parts of the plane have landed across the town, creating blockages and traffic accidents, in addition to the impending potential for a nuclear meltdown that has the capacity to surpass Fukushima and Chernobyl in terms of severity. 

Joe Morton, the narrator, does a wonderful job of telling this fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat kind of story. There are CB radio transmissions interspersed with the story, and plenty of sound effects, and I was pulled into the action right from the beginning. Newman keeps the tension high throughout the story, but she also has a talent for creating storylines that draw in my emotions—there’s the single dad and his son who are struggling to connect, a small boy who is in a tough spot to save, and then the whole town full of people who are trying to avoid the same fate as the people of Pripyat, Ukraine. However, it was incredibly frustrating to realize early on in the book that the narrator mispronounced “nuclear” as “nuc-u-lar” every time, which took me out of the story.

Each chapter starts with a countdown to the zero hour, keeping the story tense for nearly the entire time. The pace was consistently fast, but the ending felt a bit rushed. I loved the way that the characters were developed and we got to know each of their storylines to add an emotional investment to the book. Each of the characters was stuck in a tough situation, and everyone did what they had to do, regardless of what they wanted to do. While each of her stories are terrifying in a different way, this one was less claustrophobic and more far-reaching. I would suggest that if you plan to read this, to read a hard copy or e-book, and avoid the audiobook, especially if mispronunciation of simple words bother you.

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