Wildfire season in the British Columbia Interior. Experienced firefighting pilot Rafe Mackie loses control of his airplane while doing a routine drop and plummets to his death.

The investigation that follows unleashes revelations that forever change the lives of three people: Will, the pilot who watches his mentor crash; Sharon, the widow struggling to come to terms with her loss; and Nathalie, an accident investigator with shadowy connections to the incident. As a form of the truth emerges, these three are drawn into a tangle of secrets and lies, passion and grief, blame and forgiveness that forces them to confront the actions that brought one man’s life crashing down.

In her second novel, Frances Peck creates another explosive literary page-turner, one that probes love, loyalty, and the ways we try to conceal and redeem our lives.

Frances Peck, Vancouver, wrote fiction and poetry until the realities of adulthood and rent steered her toward ghostwriting, editing, and teaching. Known for her workshops on the finer points of language, she is the author of Peck’s English Pointers, a collection of essays and quizzes. She is a co-author of the popular HyperGrammar website, and an essayist and blogger whose work has appeared in Language Update, The Editors’ Weekly, West Coast Editor, and Geist. Now she’s rediscovering the magic of making things up. The Broken Places, her debut novel, was named a Globe and Mail best book of 2022.

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“Buckle up, because the seat belt sign will be on throughout Frances Peck’s new novel, Uncontrolled Flight. ...What caused an experienced ace pilot like Rafe to crash his plane when the weather was ideal and the fire conditions didn’t warrant it? The answer unfolds like an incredibly complex origami sculpture, keeping the reader turning the pages eager for the answers as much as the characters are...”
— Cathalynn Labonté-Smith, The Miramichi Reader