John J. Nance

I have a stack of old audio tape cassette books that I want to whittle down so I popped the first cassette in a cheap player that I had bought. The player buttons broke off when I turned the side over! I was so engaged by John K. Nance’s thriller, Pandora’s Clock that I held the down the metal remainder of the play button to hear the other side. This is the first time that I ever endured pain to listen to an audio book! It was that good. Thank goodness I found out that my old boom box show more still could play!

If you like airplane thrillers, you will love this story. Some of it is overly dramatic but that it is part of the fun. The reader was the author and he did a superb job of getting me sitting on the edge of my sit and excited. We had the Ebola scare here in the Dallas area so the story seemed somewhat ironic. A man collapses and later dies after he has boarded the plane. He was give mouth to mouth resuscitation. There are 235 passengers on the 747 Boeing. The pilot James Holland has the worst nightmare of any pilot when he finds out that the dead passenger may have been infected with a deadly flu virus. From then on, you can imagine his difficulties and what could potentially happen to his poor passengers.

I highly recommend this book if you love thrillers! show less

5-star reviews are rare for me, so that's how impressed I was with the tight writing, plot, and characters in "16 Souls." I've been a fan of John J. Nance for quite a few years now and feel that this is his finest work.
In this book, a pilot is put in the impossible position of choosing who lives and most probably dies after a mid-air collision between his jumbo jet and a commuter plane shortly after their Denver takeoff in a blizzard. The collision has improbably left both planes flying, show more but just barely, The commuter is badly crippled but still in the air only because it's attached to one of the jumbo jet's wings. The jumbo jet's ability to function normally has been compromised by the collision. Add to this impossibly bad weather making the return for an emergency landing abundantly difficult and you have the makings for a white-knuckler.
Nance weaves the story in and around the succeeding 2nd-degree murder trial facing the pilot after landing his damaged jet and the fall-out that was part of that action.
I don't say this often, but this truly was a book that I couldn't put down until I got to its very satisfying ending. show less

How would things be different, if we knew how things would end? If we knew that the end of our life would require a recounting of our days, to be read by the population of the world, would we live a thoughtful life? If we knew the time, method, and manner of our deaths, would we think before we act? Give mercy instead of contempt? Patience and thoughtfulness instead of intolerance and selfishness? Would we stop on the street to offer a hand to a lonely man? Would so much of our lives be show more wrapped up in petty angers, in jealousy and rage? Would envy rule our lives, or the tedium of jobs and chores and routine so blind our eye to life?

How would things be different, if we could think clearly, in our true knowledge of the fleeting quality of our lives? Would we war among ourselves, devote ourselves to hating 'the other' for the way they live their lives? For their religion, their beliefs, the colour of their skins? Would we open our eyes to how small we truly are, and how much we need one another, how very alike we really are?

What would it take, to really stop the world, if only for a time? To make us see and understand just how fragile and precious this thing called life really is?

Mr. Nance has written a book that gives you the opportunity to think of all these things and more. To place yourself in the place of the main character, and realize in just how many ways our day-to-day lives are wasted on the petty nuances of life - to wish with him, with all our hearts, that we could have led a fuller, richer, purer life.

I never really thought of Mr. Nance as a sociologist, but rather as a terrific technical writer. I have read his books for the 'techie' aspects. He knows avionics exceptionally well, and writes in a clear and riveting manner about the technical sides, in an edge-of-the-seat manner that often keeps me awake well into the night. But with "Orbit", it is almost as if I never quite saw the depth of Mr. Nance's character, of his clear understanding of the human psyche in times of ultimate stress. He made me wish, very much, that his story could be real - that the world could, if only for a week, forget their envies and their greed, their petty indignities and spite, their deeply ingrained hatreds and misunderstandings. To simply watch, and think.

Of course, sociological and emotional points aside, this is definitely an intelligent thriller, with a level of technical expertise that lives up to Mr. Nance's reputation. The concept is fascinating, and well within the realm of reality as corporations begin to research the feasibility of space travel, both financial and technical. These are interesting times, and Mr. Nance has done an amazing job of allowing us to look to the future with hope rather than despair. show less

With Saving Cascadia, Mr. Nance shows once again his expertise all things technical. He has expanded his world, and his expertise, beyond his avionic specialty, and it is a new and refreshing side to his writing that kept me awake and reading well into the night. In this novel, we move into the world of geological phenomena, and as always, Mr. Nance has written in an incredibly educated and precise manner, with a clarity that even the least 'geologically knowledgeable' can easily show more comprehend.

As a previous occupant of the Northwest Coast, I am well versed in just how devastating it will be when the subduction zone ruptures. All it takes is a walk along the cliffside beaches of Southern Oregon at lowest tide to see the total destruction which was caused by the last great quake along the coast. Once the sand has washed away in a storm, your walk will show you the bases of massive tree trunks, twenty feet or more across, sitting in a deep green clay, eight feet or more below the current cliff tops. These massive trees literally sunk under the seas when the coast ripped and fell away, straight down, into the openings left by the tears in the zone. It is both shocking and humbling to realize the true enormity of these movements and the destruction they have caused, and will again.

Mr. Nance explores not only the technical aspects of why the zone exists, but also how our intense disregard for the earth can, and most likely at some time will, cause the very destruction he posits in this novel. His Dr. Lam character is a man who not only knows deeply the geology of the earth in his location of expertise, but is capable of making the type of intuitive leap which separates the merely educated and intelligent from the truly brilliant. Mr. Nances second, or possibly first, goal in writing this novel was indeed involved in avionics, his original specialty, as he drew his characters of air rescue, giving the reader a true insight into the dedication of professional air rescue personnel and the dangers they face every day.

The interactions among the characters are realistic. Just because the world seems to be coming to an end doesn't mean that people don't still have the same issues continuing in their lives that they had before. Yes, I had guessed Dr. Lam's personal situation before learning the truth near the end of the novel, and wasn't surprised. A truly honorable man would have acted just as he did. And I was glad that a truly strong and determined, but emotionally damaged woman was able to stand up to the father who caused he so much pain in her life. I was able to deeply relate to both her strength and her pain, and was glad she finally found it within herself to stand up and say "No more", and yet get beyond that pain to forgiveness. And even a spoiled, self centered, horney old multi billionaire can pull his heads out of the sand and start thinking about someone other than himself when faced with the destruction of so many souls, especially when it is caused by his own self aggrandizement . . . and when he has to actually see and touch the people he is murdering through his own self centered disregard, not just do it 'long distance' with bombs and chemicals and poverty. Even a true misanthrope would have difficulty overlooking his responsibility in this case.

No, this isn't a solely avionic novel. Mr. Nance continues to grow with every novel - it is to be hoped that his readers will grow right along with him. show less