The Last Straw

A plane falls from the sky, and the official report calls it human error. But investigator Kessler isn't satisfied. As he interviews the friends and families of the victims, piecing together the mundane concerns and personal histories of passengers and crew, he uncovers something deeply unsettling: every person aboard shared a peculiar vulnerability, a susceptibility to disaster that seems impossible to random chance. These strangers had nothing in common except their fragile hold on safety itself. The Last Straw is a Cold War mystery that builds dread through careful accumulation, asking whether catastrophe can be predicted, whether some people are simply drawn toward disaster, and whether the truth about the crash lies not in the sky but in the very natures of those who flew. It's a novella that transforms ordinary grief into something closer to existential horror.