Noah Hawley, Before the Fall ***

I had high expectations for this novel from the showrunner of the TV show Fargo. "One part Dennis Lehane, one part Dostoevsky," says Michael Cunningham. It's a competent page-turner that avoids most of the annoying pitfalls that plague the genre, but it failed to create characters that transcend their function in the plot.

I found the rich characters particularly formulaic. The two wives who were killed in the plane crash were so similar as to be indistinguishable. The unrelated Wall Street financier and Internet heiress have very similar thoughts about how money reduces friction.