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Descend and Maintain: An Air Traffic Control Thriller
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 10 2026
Pages: 140
Weight: 0.43
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
She talks two hundred strangers safely out of the sky every night.
Tonight, a man in her kitchen wants her to kill them.
Nora Bishara is fourteen years on the boards - the calm voice in the dark room who walks frightened pilots down through the storm and never once gets thanked for it. Air traffic control is the job nobody pictures. Until the night it becomes a weapon.
11:38 p.m. A blizzard. Her phone lights up with a call from HOME - which is impossible, because HOME is a landline.
It's a video. It's her kitchen. Her mother is bound to a chair. Her eight-year-old daughter is asleep on the couch. And a masked man is explaining the rules in a voice far too calm - in the exact phraseology of someone who once sat in a chair just like hers.
He can hear her live frequency. There's a flight inbound. Two hundred and eleven souls. He wants her to take it, vector it clean, and hand it one clearance that isn't - and fly it into the mountain. Make it look like the weather.
No police. No heroes. It's finished before her relief walks in at 3 a.m. One way or the other.
To save the two people she loves, Nora has to murder a plane full of strangers. To save the strangers, she has to outthink a man who hears every word she says - using the only two rooms he can't see into: her own mind, and the storm itself.
And the deeper she goes, the worse the truth gets. This was never random. He chose this flight, this night, this controller - and the one thing that can stop him is a secret Nora buried eight years ago. A truth that will cost her everything to finally say out loud.
One night. One voice. Two hundred and eleven lives - and the two she cannot lose.
Descend and Maintain is a heart-in-your-throat thriller that plays out in real time across a single impossible night, where every choice draws blood and the clock never stops. For readers of T.J. Newman's Falling, Freida McFadden, and Harlan Coben - and anyone who's ever wondered who's really on the other end of the radio at thirty thousand feet.
You will never look at the seatbelt sign the same way again.
What Readers Are Saying...
That kitchen. That voice. I finished at 2 a.m. and just sat there. I'll never look at the seatbelt sign the same way again.
The premise alone sold me - the ending gutted me.
An air traffic controller forced to crash a plane to save her kid? Genius. But the man in the kitchen isn't a villain, he's something worse. Stayed with me for days.
If you loved Falling, cancel your plans.
Same white-knuckle grip, but this one has a conscience. Nora is the best thriller heroine I've read in years, and her mother steals every scene she's in.
One night. One voice. Zero chill.
Real-time, single-setting, absolutely relentless. My tea went stone cold and I did not care. Read it in one sitting and immediately made my sister buy it.
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