A kaleidoscopic account of the financial carnage of the pandemic, revealing the fear, grit, and gambles that drove the economy’s winners and losers—from a leading business reporter “A true masterwork . . . perceptive, well researched, and captivating.”—David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, bestselling author of How to Invest It was the ultimate test for CEOs, and almost none of them saw it coming. In early March 2020, with the Dow Jones flirting with 30,000, the world’s biggest companies were riding an eleven-year economic high. By the end of the month, millions were out of work, iconic firms were begging for bailouts, and countless small businesses were in freefall. Slick consulting teams and country-club connections were suddenly of little use: Business leaders were fumbling in the dark, tossing out long-term strategy and making decisions on the fly—decisions that, they hoped, might just save them. In Crash Landing, award-winning business journalist Liz Hoffman shows how the pandemic set the economy on fire—but if you look closely, the tinder was already there. After the global financial crisis in 2008, corporate leaders embraced cheap debt and growth at all costs. Wages flatlined. Millions were pushed into the gig economy. Companies crammed workers into offices, and airlines did the same with planes. Wall Street cheered on this relentless march toward efficiency, overlooking the collateral damage and the risks sowed in the process. Based on astonishing access inside some of the world’s biggest and most iconic companies, Crash Landing is a kaleidoscopic account of the most remarkable period in modern economic history, revealing—through gripping, fly-on-the-wall reporting—how CEOs battled an economic catastrophe for which there was no playbook: among them, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, blindsided by a virus in the middle of a high-stakes effort to go public; American Airlines’ Doug Parker, shuttling between K Street and the White House, determined to secure a multibillion-dollar bailout; and Ford’s Jim Hackett, as his assembly lines went from building cars to churning out ventilators. In the tradition of Too Big to Fail and The Big Short, Crash Landing exposes the fear, grit, and gambles behind the pandemic economy, while probing its implications for the future of work, corporate leadership, and capitalism itself, asking: Will this remarkable time give rise to newfound resilience, or become just another costly mistake to be forgotten?

Stranded! Billionaire Gibb Martin loves risk almost as much as he loves a well-made suit. But when his business partner and longtime friend suddenly bails on a major venture to get married…well, that's one risk Gibb isn't willing to take. Now he just needs to charter a plane to Florida so he can stop the wedding—fast! Normally, bombshell pilot Sophia Cruz would have told Slick City Boy exactly where to go. Unfortunately, she really needs cash—even if it does come from an overprivileged guy with a very fine backside. But then disaster strikes midair, and Sophia is forced to crash-land the plane…. Now they're alone on a stunning deserted island—and surrounded by temptation. And this is one collision they won't be able to walk away from!

The New York Times bestselling author of Cane and Abe and Black Horizon blends Goodfellas and Elmore Leonard in this wild, suspenseful caper inspired by actual events, in which a band of amateur thieves pulls off one of the biggest airport heists in history with deadly consequences. Every week, a hundred million dollars in cash arrives at Miami International Airport, shipped by German banks to the Federal Reserve. A select group of trusted workers moves the bags through Customs and loads them into armored trucks. Ruban Betancourt has always played by the rules. But the bank taking his house and his restaurant business going bust has driven him over the edge. He and his wife deserve more than life has handed them, and he’s come up with a ballsy scheme to get it. With the help of an airport insider, he, his coke-head brother-in-law, Jeffrey, and two ex-cons surprise the guards loading the armored trucks and speed off with $7.4 million in the bed of a pickup truck. Investigating the heist, FBI agent Andie Henning, newly transferred to Miami from Seattle, knows the best way to catch the thieves is to follow the money. Jeffrey’s drug addiction is as conspicuous as the Rolex watches he buys for dancers at the Gold Rush strip club. One of the ex-cons, Pinky Perez, makes no secret of his plan to own a swinger’s club—which will allow him carte blanche with his patrons’ wives. Levelheaded Ruban is desperately trying to lay low and hold things together. But Agent Henning isn’t the only one on their trail, and in the mob-meets-Miami fashion, these accidental thieves suddenly find themselves way in over their heads . . . and sinking fast.

Crash-Landing is an exploration of modern day fear and failure. Its subject is self-delusion and self-fulfillment, sexual entanglements and midlife anxiety, marriage and existential loneliness. Named after Lindbergh, his parents' hero, Charles Burg has neither the requisite head for heights nor the stomach to go it alone. Though destined for a fall, he contrives--by never looking down--to keep his marriage to Anne aloft through years of circling, of buffeting crosswinds, instrument failure and near collisions. When the crackup finally comes, the touchdown is not tragic, flaming wreck, but a nose-in-the-mud return to ground zero. Both survive the forced landing. Anne comes through better: she manages to walk away from the wreckage. Chuck crawls off, emotionally grounded. We last see him fleeing across the Atlantic, winging toward an eighty-day crash cure at a rehabilitation camp fpr bereaved ex-husbands "some twenty kilometers south of Breat." Or rather, that is the reader's first glimpse of this comedy's anti-hero, for events unfold in reverse order appearance - from the crackup back to the passionate beginning that led to the marriage. The story's counter-chronological movement gives the reader foresight, while Chuck, its first-person narrator, remains, happily or ironically, unaware of the laws of physics that govern the all too short duration of love's flight.

Stranded! Billionaire Gibb Martin loves risk almost as much as he loves a well-made suit. But when his business partner and longtime friend suddenly bails on a major venture to get married…well, that's one risk Gibb isn't willing to take. Now he just needs to charter a plane to Florida so he can stop the wedding—fast! Normally, bombshell pilot Sophia Cruz would have told Slick City Boy exactly where to go. Unfortunately, she really needs cash—even if it does come from an overprivileged guy with a very fine backside. But then disaster strikes midair, and Sophia is forced to crash-land the plane…. Now they're alone on a stunning deserted island—and surrounded by temptation. And this is one collision they won't be able to walk away from!

From a bright new talent comes this debut novel about a young woman who travels for the first time to her mother’s hometown, and gets sucked into the mystery that changed her family forever Mattie Wallace has really screwed up this time. Broke and knocked up, she’s got all her worldly possessions crammed into six giant trash bags, and nowhere to go. Try as she might, Mattie can no longer deny that she really is turning into her mother, a broken alcoholic who never met a bad choice she didn’t make. When Mattie gets news of a possible inheritance left by a grandmother she’s never met, she jumps at this one last chance to turn things around. Leaving the Florida Panhandle, she drives eight hundred miles to her mother’s birthplace—the tiny town of Gandy, Oklahoma. There, she soon learns that her mother remains a local mystery—a happy, talented teenager who inexplicably skipped town thirty-five years ago with nothing but the clothes on her back. But the girl they describe bears little resemblance to the damaged woman Mattie knew, and before long it becomes clear that something terrible happened to her mother, and it happened here. The harder Mattie digs for answers, the more obstacles she encounters. Giving up, however, isn’t an option. Uncovering what started her mother’s downward spiral might be the only way to stop her own. Hilarious, gripping, and unexpectedly wise, The Art of Crash Landing is a poignant novel from an assured new voice.

This is the inside story of the collapse of Guinness Peat Aviation in the early 1990s.