Black Box centers around these seven, three of which are desperate to recover the black box that recorded the last few minutes before the crash: The pilot, whose error in judgement in allowing his navigator to navigate while inebriated will be revealed, and a politician and lobbyist who want their relationship to remain secret.

The plane is forced down by the Chinese Air Force and crashes inside Chinese airspace, prompting tense moments for both the Chinese and U.S. governments. China is convinced the plane is a spy plane and the U.S. cannot believe a pilot could make such a misjudgment. And it's not only the airspace that's restricted. Can a rescue party risk the anger of a non-allied country just to rescue even one unlikely survivor?

As time ticks away, the seven survivors battle the below-freezing temperatures and a freakish storm high in the Chinese mountains. They are also unaware of the added danger of being 'rescued' by the wrong military rescue group.

Emerging as the unlikely leader of this group of survivors is flight attendant, Dorothy Chandler, who also carries a secret. The pilot's error was driven by her condition as she is pregnant with his child.

The remaining characters, a bishop who suffers from self-inflicted guilt, a journalist who is hot on the story of the senator and lobbyist, and a misguided woman who believes the senator actually cares for her, though, of course, he is married, add to the conflict and emotions run high.

The author darts from perspective to perspective, giving the reader a glimpse into seven lives, seven reactions to the crash and seven people who are in an antagonistic relationship with one or more of the other six survivors. While moving the plot along at a fast pace, it detracts from fully developing some truly interesting characters.

One of the strongest points of Black Box is being able to witness the strength of character or damaged psyches that emerge in the midst of chaos and crisis, driving some to turn to God, and others to turn to personal gain or even death. Each character is different and it's interesting to note their actions and thoughts.

While it has its problems, Black Box is a quick read that tickles the senses and leaves the reader wanting more.

I want to be very careful to not spoil here -- there are some twists and turns starting early on that served to pull me in when I wasn't that interested. The constant back and forth through time, while not confusing, was a bit much in the opening chapters. But then the twists kick in: for whom are the priests looking in an abandoned Nazi death camp field? Why does it seem that the bishop is possessed by evil instead of exorcising it? Why does the young Stephen, seminarian and hopeful pastoral candidate, get selected to join a hush-hush rumored legendary sect of monks who have been charged with protecting the catacon, the human component of The Restrainer mentioned in 2 Thessalonians? How does Nora fit in, a Harvard student putting off her psychology dissertation to investigate her own mugging by terrorists and the constant tragedy and blessing being visited on her family for generations? And who is this "Restrainer," someone charged by God to never die and to forever "restrain the Enemy"?

Those are just a few of the questions that lead deep into the heart of a story that does a fine job of being part Highlander, part This Present Darkness and part Thomas Merton. And here's where I have really enjoyed this book. It goes deep into the recesses of "what if?" and comes out with something plausible in both scripture and in real human relationships. The monastic meditative qualities of the participants, taken into account with the action and increasing danger, have been a strong pull for me. When I read fiction, I want to be entertained - and Olsen does a fine job of entertaining me as a casual reader. But I also like to be challenged spiritually and to be intrigued as the characters grow and discover things about themselves and God. On that level, The Assignment really works.

Now on the twentieth anniversary of the series, the original writer Marv Wolfman has come up with a novelization of the events that rocked the DC universe. But instead of telling the story in linear form and in great detail (as was done with the amazing novel Kingdom Come), he's told the story from the perspective of its greatest sacrifice: the Flash. Barry Allen narrates the story of his death and life during the cataclysmic moments of the crisis. For some unknown reason, the Flash is thrown into an ethereal state and must watch helplessly as worlds and heroes die around him. Told from this perspective, we see how the Flash actually shaped some of the events from "behind the scenes". How in the world does a dead guy get to describe his moment of death in detail and the things that occurred afterward? Time-travel, dimension-hopping, and all the other little quirks that make comics so much fun.

The chapters in this book are extremely short (literally one or two pages on average), which makes the flow a little disjointed at times. And since this isn't a blow-by-blow retelling of the story, there are numerous highlights of the comic series that either never get mentioned or are just touched upon briefly. Still, the book could be considered essential reading for a complete picture of what really happened, and why the story truly was a crisis. There are a few chapters describing events involving other heroes, slowing the breakneck pace that otherwise permeates the book.

If you've never read the comic book, you'll definitely want to read it first. Some of the major twists and jaw-dropping moments will only get a cursory nod here. Savor the depth of the story in comic form, then read this book for the icing on the cake.

The Flash's death has always been considered a sacred moment for DC Comics. He's one of the only major characters who has died and never returned (Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Superman, and Supergirl have all come back), showing just how monumental the event truly was. After reading this, you'll see why.

Annie Kingston is a forensic artist. In other words, she draws dead people. Or at least she tries to recreate what they looked like when they were still alive. It's a stressful job, requiring her to visit crime scenes, take pictures of mutilated victims, and come up with a composite that will help the police capture their murderers. But the difficulties of her job aren't the only problems Annie has to deal with. She's a single mother. Her ex-husband is a complete jerk and her teenage son is hanging with the wrong crowd. Oh, there's also a serial killer terrorizing her hometown.

This serial killer has a penchant for collecting personal items from the victims. With each murder, the collection grows and becomes more gruesome. The murders come home to Annie, literally, when one of the dead bodies is found in her back yard. From that trigger-point on, she finds herself in the thick of the case.

Collins' plot has more twists and turns than a mountain road. Everyone is a suspect. Just when Annie thinks she can relax for a moment, something worse happens to her. It's difficult to describe the plot without giving away key elements of it, but suffice it to say, this book is never boring and definitely not predictable.

Collins also does a terrific job of incorporating faith and prayer throughout the story. In Christian fiction, it's often difficult to find a balance between the faith element and the plot. A lot of times, it's either layered on too thickly or glossed over completely. But in Dead of Night the faith of the characters and what they do to combat the evil permeating their community never feels forced or artificial.

The research in this story is top notch. The dialogue always rings true. Character emotions are expressed, but never denigrate into melodrama. By the end of the book I felt as if I knew Annie and the other residents of Redding, California. I felt their fear, their pain, and their hope. That's what great fiction does--it makes you feel, makes you experience, makes you believe the story is real. And this is great fiction.

This is the second in his "Five Senses" series, in which each novel deals with a different sense. In Dark to Mortal Eyes, the main characters could see into the spirit realm and see things that were happening others couldn't notice. In Expiration Date, the sense is touch. When Clay Ryker touches a person, he knows the date they will die. While this seems like a blessing, it can be a curse when he realizes there's nothing he can do to save the person from their fate.

Ryker returns to his hometown in the midst of a bitter divorce. Dealing with the loss of his wife and son, he seeks solace with his parents. Unfortunately, when he arrives, he finds himself with this new ability. As his predictions become even more accurate, the local police begin to suspect him in some of the deaths. Now a horrible secret from Ryker's past has come back to haunt him, and when he "sees" the date of his own son's death, what can he do to stop it?

Wilson burst onto the scene last year with a novel that couldn't be easily slotted into any current Christian fiction genre. He follows up with a fantastic story along the same vein that shows tremendous growth in his writing. You'll need to read Dark To Mortal Eyes first to get the full picture of what he's building, but this also reads well as a stand-alone story. If you're a fan of Dean Koontz or Frank Peretti, you should pick this one up. This is a first-class thriller you won't put down until it's over.

We're also seeing a surge in books that look at the spirituality embedded in many of the staples of modern culture: from the gospel as revealed in The Simpsons to the spirituality of The Matrix movies. So it is no surprise that the market has been hit recently with no fewer than three books that look at the spirituality inherent in comic books. The latest of these, Greg Garrett's Holy Superheroes!, takes a closer look at the overarching themes of comics. In ten concise chapters, Garrett, a professor of English at Baylor University, looks at many of the major mythic ideas in comics. From each, he "connects the dots" to show how comic books both reflect and enforce Biblical ideas.

The chapter titles and subjects will not come as a surprise to anyone in our culture, so prevalent as these ideas have become: "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility," "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," "The Problem of Evil," and "Vigilante Justice," for example. From these broad chapter titles, Garrett digs deeper, showing how comics are important because their profound nature allows for discussion and reflection on important themes. Ultimately, Garrett reveals how comics are redemptive in that the major themes of the better comics are themes that the Bible reinforces and supports.

Dian: I've read that you never intended to be a novelist, but now that you are, what routines do you follow to complete a book?

Ward: It's true that initially, as a part of my pastoral work, I was writing magazine articles and non-fiction, which I still do occasionally. It was several years before I first wrote a couple of short stories and took them to a writer's conference to see what an editor might think about my skills (or lack thereof). A couple of editors encouraged me saying, "You can do this; go home and write the great novel." I subsequently had to wrestle with whether or not I was being frivolous and should stay with more "serious and meaningful stuff."

Higgs has outdone herself with Whence Came a Prince. Her style of writing - always beautifully flowing, lyrical and evocative - has truly blossomed in this book.

If you haven't read the first two books, you might be asking, "Jacob was married to Leah and Rachel at the same time. How does Higgs pull that off in 18th-century Scotland?" I had the same question when I first started reading the books. But pull it off she does, albeit using some creative liberties with the story. You'll have to read them yourself to find out exactly how she does it. Higgs has saturated herself with Scottish culture and ambience, with repeated trips to the country she now calls her second home. The fact that she's availed herself of the lore in hundreds of Scottish research books is obvious in the telling of these stories. But her meticulous research is seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of the story.

Jamie comes across as flawed, but charming as well as humble and repentant - as tricky as his Biblical alter ego, but no less attractive and lovable for his flaws. As we've seen in the earlier books, he has escaped the consequences of deceiving his father, and fled from his brother's wrath by venturing across Scotland to the area of his mother's birth. He has fallen head-over-heels in love with the beautiful Rose, only to be thrown together with the less stunning but appealing Leana, who he grows to love as well. In Whence Came a Prince, Jamie is living with the hand that God has dealt him, albeit with some sadness and regret. The situation with his hateful, cheapskate uncle Lachlan is coming to a head, and Jamie must return to the land of his father. But does the murderous anger of his brother await him? And how will the situation with the two women he loves be resolved?

Higgs' sensitive empathy with her characters brings them to life and makes us feel their pain, their joy, and their faith by transporting us into their world to the point that we're sad when the story is over and we have to close the book.

"Funny that it took a comet to trigger a small but radical change in my life. In the years until then, I'd been sieving the contents of my days with ever finer mesh, trying to sort out those sharp and nasty bits that were causing me grief: bad ideas, pointless habits, robotic thinking. Like anybody, I wanted to find out if my life, while technically adequate, had become all it was ever going to be. If I could just keep things going on their current even keel for a few more decades, the coroner could dump me into a peat bog without ever having once gone fully crazy." (p. 3)

Such is the glimpse into the life of Liz Dunn, the frumpy mid-30s female protagonist of Douglas Coupland's latest novel, Eleanor Rigby.

Coupland tends to see a great deal of truth in life, and that truth often involves people's perceptions of God and the world through some sort of naive or cynical faith. Coupland's Life After God is one of the best collections of stories/essays on growing up and dealing with life as a post-Boomer. Hey, Nostradamus tackles church youth groups, growing up and out of those groups, and living in general as people with some sort of faith.

In this novel, Coupland channels the manic stream-of-consciousness thoughts of Liz, who is lonely, tired of being so uptight, and trying to find a more relaxed state of mind. Suddenly, through some bizarre circumstances, a young man is dropped into her normally drab life. If it's not enough to get wisdom teeth pulled and have to deal with her paranoid mom and overworked siblings, the night after first seeing the Hale-Bopp comet, she receives a call from the emergency room at the local hospital. It is there that a 20-year-old male has been brought in to recover from a drug episode wearing a medical bracelet with her name. Oddly enough, she has no idea who this young man could possibly be.

Using flashbacks and even flashbacks-within-flashbacks, Coupland expertly places us inside Liz's head. In deciding to not live her life as a spinster hostage, and then almost immediately receiving the opportunity to move way beyond what had become a comfort zone, Liz is ready for the changes ahead. She is able to make the decision to just live life -- meaningful life beyond the drudgery -- and then seeing that twist of fate open up a whole new pathway.

Maybe it's too clean-cut. If she had not made the inner decision, what would her life look like with the stranger coming into a less-than-welcome scenario? What would it look like if she held more stubbornly to her privacy and what little grip she had or thought she had? What if she tried to keep control instead of realizing that was a facade and needed to be discarded? Those are the questions that have come to me in my own life, and Coupland just used the characters and plot to bring them around in my head again.

Finding new life and new meaning in her relationship with Jeremy (the 20-year-old with an excitement about selling mattresses), she discovers new things about herself. If we need anything as individuals and as communities of friends, it's to see each other in new ways -- both humanizing and meaningful. In finding herself, Liz becomes a more heroic figure than she probably thought possible.

Robert Crais is on his eighth Elvis Cole novel, and he delivers a powerful work once again. Following on the heels of The Last Detective, The Forgotten Man opens a few weeks later with another emotional quest for Elvis Cole.

Cole is perhaps the most alive character I've run across in some time. He's strong, convicted, honorable, and vulnerable. Suspense heroes are not often multi-dimensional, and we don't connect with them on the cerebral level. Crais's characters are different. He has gone three steps ahead of himself in The Forgotten Man. Or should I say, delved three levels deeper.

Trying to recover from the breakup with his much-loved Lucy Chenier, Elvis goes through the motions of everyday life with robotic steps, until a small spark of interest is lighted by the discovery of a murdered man who might be Elvis's long-lost dad. Cole's loyal sidekick, Joe Kidd, also appears and his role as a true friend has another layer peeled away. He warily agrees to both assist Cole and protect him - from more emotional damage, if necessary.

The poignant character of female detective Carol Starkey makes an impact in The Forgotten Man as she has developed an interest in the now-single Cole. Fans of Crais will remember Starkey from Demolition Angel, a bomb-squad officer who died and was brought back to life after an explosion. Starkey happens to be the one who discovers the man who might be Cole's biological connection to the world. But Cole has no interest in any females other than the absent Chenier.

Several viewpoints are used throughout this novel and they serve the plotline well. Crais uses these varying perspectives to increase the tension. Also, Crais is a master at weaving several tales into one, and complicating his main character's journey at every step seems to delight this author. Unbeknownst to Cole, a psychopath has targeted him, fearful that Cole will uncover the secret the dead man held.

Of course, the violence in suspense thrillers like the Elvis Cole novels is expected. Crais manages to give readers a hero who can use brute force when necessary, and he normally uses violence only when the situation requires it for survival or protection of someone else.

Overall, Crais has developed into a suspense writer at the top of his game and The Forgotten Man is a fine example of that.