Swinging Gates

The story line begins with a commercial helicopter departing on its final flight of the evening from Midway Airport located on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Its destination is O'Hare International Airport just eleven miles away. Inside the Sikorsky aircraft are two senior pilots flying local businessmen to their various connecting flights. The weather that evening was a typical summer night with few clouds and clear visibility, allowing the aircraft to fly under visual flight rules. Instead of reaching its scheduled destination, the helicopter encounters a catastrophic event, causing it to suddenly begin to spin out of control and crash into a nearby cemetery just shortly after taking off. Everyone on board was killed despite a heroic effort of skillful flying by the copilot. Although the event immediately caused several areas of concern for the company and several questions about future safe operations, the FAA ruled that the accident was simply the result of a structural failure, which caused the tail section rotor blade to separate from the main body of the aircraft.

The reader barely gets a chance to breathe as the story line moves rapidly from the time period of July 27, 1960, to the current day when a newly elected congressman with presidential aspirations has encouraged a new investigation into the circumstances of that fatal day, the reason being that it was his uncle who had been the helicopter captain. That opportunity quickly arrives when the congressman visits the location where the helicopter had crashed and, while he is there, meets a private investigator who was visiting the grave of his departed relative. Then hired by the congressman to look into the past event, the detective soon learns that there's much more to this story than just an aircraft mishap. Within a short period of time, he discovers that the helicopter was carrying the briefcase that had originally belonged to the passenger who had been denied passage on the flight even though he had been holding a confirmed ticket. That briefcase destined for Tombstone, Arizona, was never located, nor was it ever explained as to why the helicopter had left the departure gate with one empty seat.

Swinging Gates is an edge-of-your-seat, nail-biting, page-turner of a novel that takes you to the dark side of Washington, DC, where the reader soon begins to get the feeling that the people that now work at the White House and those back in Illinois are failing to tell the complete story. Swinging Gates is a complex political thriller, one that has the reader turning the pages to find out what is really going on.

-- K.L. Dempsey