Review: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ "A character-centered technological thriller with substantial strands of romance, corporate drama, aviation fiction, and family history."

Thomas Anderson, Editor In Chief

Literary Titan

D Cohen’s TwinStar, the first novel in the GW Canyon series, is an aviation thriller built around a technological catastrophe and the people drawn into its widening consequences. The novel opens with Sierra West Flight 721 behaving as though an unseen operator has taken control, leaving its crew unable to command the aircraft before it crashes near Melrose, New Mexico. From there, Cohen expands the story into an investigation involving aircraft manufacturer TwinStar, software entrepreneur and pilot GW Canyon, systems engineer Allison Tobias, and an increasingly disturbing trail of compromised technology. The author announces his governing principle before the story begins: “Plots fade. Characters don’t.” That statement proves to be more than a preface to the novel. Although TwinStar contains sabotage, corporate intrigue, hidden alliances, violence, and multiple aviation emergencies, its central interest lies in the lives caught inside that machinery.

Allison is especially important to the book’s design. Her expertise in TwinStar’s onboard systems places her at the center of the technical investigation, but Cohen gives equal attention to the way she evaluates relationships, friendship, grief, and her own decisions. Her methodical temperament carries naturally from the laboratory into the rest of her life, creating a character whose professional intelligence and emotional intelligence continually inform one another. Other women, including Connie Finley, Elaine Ionello, Ming Hunter, Heidi Mesmer, and NTSB investigator Lisa Myers, broaden the novel beyond a single heroine and give its events several distinct human perspectives. GW remains a major presence, with his history as a rancher’s son, pilot, software entrepreneur, widower, and father gradually filling in the man behind the public success. His developing relationship with Allison becomes one of the novel’s principal emotional threads, and it works because their attraction grows through shared work, danger, candor, and increasing trust.

The technological mystery is carefully constructed around the CCS flight-control system and, eventually, a tiny P120 microchip capable of responding to concealed commands. A second aircraft incident at O’Hare, a dangerous live test aboard TwinStar #43, Ian Wunderlich’s suspicious death, and evidence of an insider at TwinStar progressively turn an apparent systems failure into deliberate sabotage. One of the book’s most effective discoveries comes when Heidi tests the suspect chips and realizes, simply, “It listens.” That compact observation changes the scale of the story. What first appears to be an aviation problem becomes a vulnerability embedded in ordinary electronics, with implications far beyond a single manufacturer or crash. Cohen handles this escalation through engineering details, corporate maneuvering, investigation, and physical danger, while keeping the technical material connected to recognizable stakes. The closing “News from the Future” section then carries those implications forward, showing how the P120 scandal eventually grows into an international crisis.

As a whole, TwinStar is a character-centered technological thriller with substantial strands of romance, corporate drama, aviation fiction, and family history. Its three-part structure allows the initial disaster to develop into a larger conspiracy while also making room for mourning, friendship, sexuality, parenthood, and second chances. The ending brings the investigative and personal arcs to different kinds of resolution: the immediate threat is exposed, the larger P120 story is positioned to reverberate beyond the novel, and Allison and GW arrive in Colorado with the possibility of a shared future that feels deliberately chosen. That balance defines the book. TwinStar treats technology as consequential because of the people who design it, exploit it, investigate it, and depend on it, and it treats intimacy with the same attention to observation and decision. The result is a novel in which the aviation mystery provides the structure, but character gives the story its lasting weight.