Book Review: Worst Case Scenario | T.J. Newman

This is a spoiler-free review. If you’re looking for spoilers, you can find them on the spoiler-page.

If you haven’t read T. J. Newman before, she’s known for her heart-pounding thrillers set around a crisis (plane hijacking, plane submerged underwater, etc). In her latest book, Worst Case Scenario, another plane crash is the initiating event, but the book is very much about what happens after that plane crash. Buckle up!

What is Worst Case Scenario about?

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.

What did I think?

This book is tense! A plane crashes after a pilot suffers a heart attack, and the commercial airliner crashes into a nuclear power plant in a rural, small town in Minnesota. The plane crash sets off an absolutely terrifying scenario where a Level 8 nuclear event (the highest in record) threatens to leak into the Mississippi river, affecting water supplies, agriculture resources, and disrupting the entire country. Not to mention the people who live in the town are in imminent danger and it seems impossible that they’ll get out.

Blog readers may or may not know that I work in counterterrorism, and so I struggled to read this and remember this was not a terrorist attack, it was a tragic accident. This doesn’t fundamentally change most of the story, but just a note about where my mind was while reading. I would say it took until about 50% until I was into the book, though I think that is a minority view. I am too much of a character-driven reader and the main character storylines didn’t really take off for me until around then. The back half is gripping and the ending is a total heartbreaker.

There are a lot of characters and perspectives, so it wasn’t immediately clear who was a main character and who wasn’t. There’s a countdown through the book that puts the pressure on—only 16 hours and 38 minutes before total devastation. The story follows a mix of people involved from the President of the United States to the local firefighters. There’s a crisis management team involved. The local church tackles humanitarian efforts without a second ask. By the second half, I was hooked but in that stomach churning way. These people cannot catch a break! The ending is sad. So, so sad. I’m not sure if it was intended to be sad, but I was crushed with emotion!

Do the audiobook for this one, the narrator really keeps things engaging but even (needed in such a stressful book!).

If you want a quick breakdown of how it ended, head to the spoilers page…

About the Author

T.J. Newman is a former bookseller and flight attendant whose first novel, Falling, became a publishing sensation and debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. Her second novel, Drowning, was released in May 2023 and it too became an instant New York Times bestseller. The books were named best books of the year by USA Today, Esquire, and Amazon, among many others, and both have been published in thirty-five countries. Each will soon be major motion pictures after both sold in headline making seven-figure deals: Falling with Universal Pictures, and Drowning with Warner Brothers. T.J. lives in Phoenix, Arizona.