PRESS:

An aeroplane vanishes, and the truth goes with it

Signatures of Silence. The second instalment of Silent Skies. Sam Thorne’s new political thriller tackles the unsolved mystery of MH370 – and it really gets under your skin.

BOOK REVIEW

Karl-Heinz Hüning (on Wagner-Journal)

7/8/2026 · 8-minute read

There are books that come along, do their job and then disappear again. And there are books like Signatures of Silence that stay with you because they won’t let you rest.

Incidentally, Sam Thorne is a pseudonym. Whether the author is a man or a woman is something they have yet to reveal, even though two substantial volumes have now been published under this name. In the case of Kim Koplin and The Dead of Tomorrow, we already knew this from this very column. It seems to have become something of a trend amongst the best thriller writers in this country.

What’s it about? With the second volume of the Silent Skies series, Thorne has delivered yet another aviation thriller. This one centres on MH370: the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that vanished without trace from radar on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board and has still not been found to this day. No wreckage, no black boxes, no explanation that really holds water. That’s exactly where Thorne comes in.

Anyone familiar with the first instalment – the story of the fictional Germanair crash in the Alps, easily recognisable as an allusion to the real Germanwings disaster – knows how Thorne operates: concise, cool, precise. The second instalment steps it up a notch.

At the centre of it all are Sophie Thalberg, an investigative journalist with the apt codename ‘Shadow’, and Till Gorny, a former intelligence officer who had actually turned his back on the business but is now being drawn back in. Then there’s Florentine de Passy, a French journalist, clearly modelled on the real Florence de Changy, a Le Monde correspondent in Hong Kong – Thorne states this himself in the foreword; there’s no hiding it.

On the other side is an organisation with the evocative codename Blue Harvest. Not villains in the traditional sense, but rather officials simply doing their jobs. That’s almost the creepiest thing about the whole book.

And then there’s Marlene Sutter, a CIA agent in Bangkok, who climbs the career ladder with stoic calm. When she makes a decision, you don’t notice it from grand speeches, but from the way she sets her glass back down on the table. A small gesture, a big impact. That’s how the whole book works.

Some will now think of le Carré. That’s true to a certain extent. Except that Thorne is tougher, more modern, less of a gentleman. Stylistically, he sits somewhere between le Carré and John J. Nance, with a dash of the geopolitical scope familiar from Tom Clancy. Short sentences when the going gets tough. Long ones when there’s time to catch one’s breath. Not a word too many – something that cannot be said of most thrillers currently being churned out.

What convinced me most of all was the anger simmering beneath the prose, without ever becoming preachy. Thorne does not lay blame. He shows how things work when a convenient explanation becomes the definitive one, simply because nobody wants to look any closer.

The foreword is remarkable. Before the very first scene even begins, Thorne explains the justification for a novel drawing on a real, unsolved tragedy involving real deaths. No excuses, just a list: Iran-Contra, MKULTRA, the falsified incubator testimony by Hill & Knowlton, the lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the NSA affair exposed by Snowden. All cases in which the official version ultimately didn’t hold up. And then there’s that one sentence that sticks in the mind:

“I’m not saying: ‘It was like that.’ I’m saying: ‘It could have been like that.’”

The book is dedicated to the 239 passengers and crew members; the appendix contains two fictional newspaper articles; and in the foreword, Thorne specifically names the real-life lawyer Grace Nathan and her victims’ families’ initiative, Voice370.

Yes, some chapters containing satellite handshake data and radio logs are no walk in the park for an impatient reader. But that is precisely what makes the book credible. Anyone who wants accuracy rather than sensationalism will find this the perfect read.

My verdict: a cracking book. Read it. And in future, don’t take official press conferences on air disasters at face value straight away.

Sam Thorne: Silent Skies II – Signatures of Silence. Novel. Available via www.silent-skies.de and bookshops, ISBN 978-3-695-63228-2, 584 pages, paperback. Available at: books.by/tvbmedia-productions/silent-skies-ii

INTERVIEW: The truth rarely flies first class

A café, somewhere in Berlin, which shall remain nameless. Sam Thorne orders a coffee, black, with sugar. The last bit of honesty, they say, that one can still afford. The rest of the conversation proves the opposite. Or perhaps not.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Sam Thorne, let’s start with the obvious. No one knows your face, no one knows your name, not even your gender. Why go to all this trouble?

SAM THORNE: It’s not a bother. More of a condition. Man, woman, both, neither — take your pick, I’m not committing myself. I write about things that some people would rather see forgotten. It helps to be hard to pin down yourself.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Your new novel, Signatures of Silence, is the second instalment in the Silent Skies series. The title is almost poetic for a genre that usually promotes itself with explosions.

SAM THORNE: Silence isn’t an absence. It’s a choice. A crash itself is anything but silent; the impact can be heard for kilometres, every single time. But almost in the same breath comes the silence that follows, including the lack of answers. When a Boeing 777 vanishes from the radar screens, this silence is the real catastrophe. Nobody explains anything, because nobody can – or wants to – explain anything. And then there’s the word itself: ‘signature’, from the Latin signatura, signum – a sign. Silence, too, is a sign. Perhaps the clearest of all. That, more than any chase, is the actual plot of my book.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Volume one was published last September, with a palpable connection to a real-life air disaster. How do you deal with a subject in literature that is still a raw wound for many people?

SAM THORNE: Carefully. And accurately. I do not invent victims. Nor do I invent mechanisms; I describe those that exist, those that were employed. Volume one relates to the Germanwings disaster. An Airbus A320 that crashed in the French Alps, every piece of wreckage recovered, every technical question answerable. And yet, within 48 hours – and before any concrete investigation had even taken place – a co-pilot was declared a murderer, without a trial, without a verdict. That label still clings to his name to this day. The investigation files, both French and German, do not in fact support such a clear-cut conclusion. Quite the opposite. The fiction only begins with the people who use this mechanism to their own advantage.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Your protagonist is called Sophie Thalberg. A journalist, not a secret agent. Why this choice?

SAM THORNE: Because journalists are the only ones who are still allowed to ask questions without wearing a uniform. Sophie doesn’t have a licence to kill. She has something more dangerous: a licence to question.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: At her side is Till Gorny, codenamed Falcon. A man with a past.

SAM THORNE: Everyone in this book has a past. Some wear it like a coat. Till wears it like a wound that must never heal, because it keeps him honest.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: A key setting is the Villa Falcon on Lake Geneva. One of the two excerpts on your website is set there.

SAM THORNE: Geneva is the Switzerland that nobody shows in travel brochures. High walls, polite security guards, and people who make decisions for which others die. The villa isn’t a place. It’s a principle with a view of the lake.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: The second excerpt takes us to a CIA control centre. Where does your knowledge of such rooms come from?

SAM THORNE: From personal contacts. From reports, from files, from conversations that cannot be quoted. And, yes, also from my own observations. I have visited such rooms myself in the course of my journalistic work, more than once. You don’t have to make everything up. You just have to know where to look.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: You yourself have flown various types of aircraft over the decades. How much of that experience goes into the cockpit scenes?

SAM THORNE: Enough that a pilot wouldn’t roll their eyes whilst reading it. Anyone who’s ever flown is familiar with the cabin. I’m interested in the cockpit – the place no passenger ever sees, where the aircraft is actually piloted. I know what it feels like when something out of the ordinary happens in there, when systems fail – the radio first of all. I write that from memory, not from Wikipedia.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Your book also has a distinctly media-critical dimension. PR machines that construct narratives before the facts have even been established.

SAM THORNE: That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s industry knowledge. There’s always a civil aviation accident investigation. It looks for causes to prevent an accident from happening again, not for culprits. As soon as foul play is suspected, a criminal investigation is launched. This seeks to identify perpetrators, but they are rarely named or prosecuted. The blame then often falls on the pilots, especially if they are dead and can no longer defend themselves. And then there is a third element that officially features in no proceedings: the search for the truth. For the bereaved, this is the only thing that really matters. In reality, this can only be driven forward by a well-organised victims’ organisation, supported by critical journalists who genuinely understand the aviation system and highlight the underlying issues rather than simply parroting the official line. Following the Germanwings disaster, the so-called ‘two-person rule’ in the cockpit was introduced in many places, purely as a precaution – nothing more. This does nothing to address the fundamental question of who is ultimately held truly accountable, and who is merely made to take the fall.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Let’s stick with MH370. What remains unresolved about this case to this day?

SAM THORNE: Almost everything. Officially, we know that the aircraft lost contact on 8 March 2014, and that, according to Inmarsat’s satellite handshake data, it continued flying for hours, far off its original route. In 2015, a single piece of wreckage – a flaperon – washed ashore on Réunion. Further fragments followed, scattered across the western Indian Ocean, but no fuselage, no flight recorders, no location where anyone can say with certainty: this is where it lies. One of the most extensive search operations in aviation history, and in the end, a case file with no answers. It is precisely this official lack of knowledge that provides the fertile ground for my novel.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: When reading your work, one detects echoes of le Carré, the precision of John J. Nance, and the geopolitical scope of Tom Clancy. Do you feel you are part of this tradition?

SAM THORNE: They are good neighbours. Le Carré knew that the most interesting lies are those that believe their own story. Nance knew what a machine sounds like when it dies. I wanted both. And a third thing, which I’d rather not name.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Without asking for spoilers — what can readers expect in terms of content, without me revealing anything that you might take offence at?

SAM THORNE: An Airbus A320 that crashed in the Alps, fully recovered, and whose crash is still being misrepresented to this day. A second one, a Boeing 777, which vanishes without trace over one of the most heavily monitored regions on Earth – satellites included – and has still not been found. People in Geneva, Paris, Washington and the Gulf of Thailand, each holding a piece of the same truth, none with the full picture. A woman who gets closer to the answer than is good for her health. And someone who must prove that loyalty isn’t a one-way street. I’ll say no more. Otherwise, you won’t need the book, and I’ll need a solicitor.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: So your pseudonym remains a mystery.

SAM THORNE: Mysteries sell better than answers. Ask me again when volume three is out. Until then, I’ll remain the person who drinks black coffee and explains nothing.

WAGNER-JOURNAL: Final question: what happens when readers slam the book shut at the end?

SAM THORNE: I hope they ask themselves an uncomfortable question. How often in recent years have journalists simply regurgitated what they were told, rather than doing their own research? How often has a convenient explanation been accepted as definitive, simply because nobody wanted to look any closer? If, as a result, someone watches a news programme or reads a newspaper article with a touch more scepticism, I’ll have achieved more than I ever could with any bestseller list.