by Rick Mofina
Release Date: April 28, 2026
2026 Doubleday Canada
Softcover ARC; 400 Pages
ISBN: 978-0385701983
ASIN: B0FJ7YXY96
Audiobook: B0FJBDDJGZ
Genre: Fiction / Thriller
Source: Review copy from publisher
3.75 / 5 Stars
Summary
One sunny day in California, Jessie is hugging
her nine-year-old son, Dylan, goodbye at the airport. He's travelling by
himself, all the way across the country, to visit his father, Jessie's
soon-to-be ex-husband, and his grandparents. Several hours later, Jessie gets a frantic call from Dylan's grandmother in New York. Dylan is missing.
In a second, Jessie's world turns upside down. The AirTag she'd stuck in his backpack says he's still at LAX. The airline insists that he was picked up at JFK by an elderly couple claiming to be his grandparents—but Jessie's in-laws insist they haven't seen him. Dylan has disappeared into thin air.
At the same moment, miles away, in Toronto, a train operator loses control of a subway train, and the fiery crash injures dozens of passengers. Jessie doesn’t know it yet, but this crash is inextricably linked to Dylan's disappearance. She has to find out how—and where her son is.
In a second, Jessie's world turns upside down. The AirTag she'd stuck in his backpack says he's still at LAX. The airline insists that he was picked up at JFK by an elderly couple claiming to be his grandparents—but Jessie's in-laws insist they haven't seen him. Dylan has disappeared into thin air.
At the same moment, miles away, in Toronto, a train operator loses control of a subway train, and the fiery crash injures dozens of passengers. Jessie doesn’t know it yet, but this crash is inextricably linked to Dylan's disappearance. She has to find out how—and where her son is.
My Thoughts
One Second Away is one of those books that I read with a lot of trepidation as it took several of my fears and put them into one book: one, the fear of losing a child; two, the fear of being in train/plane collision; and three, having no control over any of it. This author grabbed your attention with a train crash right at the beginning of the book and pretty much never let up on the tension from that point on.
While I enjoyed this quite a bit, I did struggle with Jessie as a main character. I could certainly forgive her abrasiveness when wanting to know more information from the police about her missing child, but it irks me to no end when a person thinks they have a right to know everything and even barges in on a scene that is being criminally investigated and could compromise evidence. This was Jessie. Don't be Jessie. While brilliant when it comes to computers (something I'll come back to in a moment), she was not very good with personal relationships. While I understood her being abrasive with the police as they thought she was a suspect, she was like that with her friends as well. And for such a brilliant computer coder/designer, she spent most of her time running around the country like a chicken with her head cut off rather than doing any of her brilliant computer stuff. I know she had a team to help her, but why wouldn't she help them too? Why wouldn't she at least try to take some of the information herself and try to figure it out? She kept hinting at how it could be personal, so why share everything she had with others when they may not be trustworthy? I just didn't get it.
Where this book really shines however, is the plot. This is not a character-driven story by any means, so the fast, tension-filled plot redeems the lack of character development. This is one of those books I kept picturing as a movie as it moved pretty quickly and the tension never let up. And I kept thinking of the movie Speed, how fun it was, but how silly some of the scenes were because you had to suspend belief for a lot of the movie. This is exactly the way it was in this book. Great action scenes, but you just had to go with it. I didn't find it difficult to figure out the culprit(s) in this book, but as I mentioned the character development was one-dimensional, at best.
Verdict
One Second Away was a fun, propulsive thriller that was heavy on tension and plot, but light on character and character development. You had to suspend belief quite a few times and just go with it, but that was okay, although I am sure those with more technological know-how might have different thoughts about this. I liked how the author managed to pull all the threads together even if I thought the reason was flimsy in the end. If you like fast-paced thrillers, this one might be for you.
