Synopsis: The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.
Dubbed ‘The Three’ by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention. This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children’s behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival…
Title: The Three
Author: Sarah Lotz
Publisher: Hodder
Pub Date: 26th February 2015
Pages: 480
ISBN: 9781444770384
Rating: 
I saw the cover of The Three whilst book browsing on Amazon in February and it took all my strength not to buy it. The cover, matched with the blurb promised a pretty amazing story but I had bought too many books and promised myself I would be good and hold off.
A few months later, a good friend read the book and wouldn’t stop raving about it. She practically forced me to buy it (I wasn’t that hard to convince). I decided to save it for my holiday; there’s nothing like relaxing on a plane journey with a story about four planes crashing…especially when you’re faced with a bit of turbulence.
I made it off the plane, and fell in love with the novel. The Three is split into short snippets; news articles, interviews, transcripts, recordings – each providing a hint or a clue to what really happened. The prose was gripping and fast-paced, the characters were realistic and the plot was terrifying. I raced through the book in a matter of hours.
But then I got to the end and everything crashed and burned. After all the drama, the questions, the innate fear of the unknown, Lotz explains it all away… badly. This is one of my biggest pet hates – we don’t ALWAYS need to know the answers. If it’s better to leave it hanging, then do (a brilliant example of this is Bird Box). Keep me upset and scared;leave me frustrated and dying to know; but whatever you do – do NOT leave me feeling ‘meh’ because the end was awful.
The end, and the end alone is the reason why The Three gets three stars. 95% of it is brilliant and I would still recommend it to people, even if it’s just so that we can complain about the last 5% together.
A Literary Mind 