I very much enjoyed Adams' previous novel, Harbor, a story of Algerians who stowaway on ship to the US and what becomes of them. Her latest novel brings us the story behind what could be headlines on any given day.

A pilot ejects from her F16 Viper just before it crashes in the Potomac River at night, the lights of the Watergate Hotel twinkling in the distance. The pilot is Captain Mary "Extra" Goodwin and it is her story that is the anchor line in this complex literary thriller.

The "room" of the book's title is the newsroom of a prominent D.C. newspaper, always a flurry of activity, but now scrambling to sort fact from rumor about the crash, and as fast as they can. We see how the newsroom works in fascinating detail.

The "chair" of the book's title is Will Holmes, former soldier and spook now running a secretive agency—the one responsible for the crash—which was testing a remote way to control a plane without the pilot knowing it, a way to stop suicide pilots—without Capt. Goodwin's knowledge.

The narrative moves In alternating segments between several plotlines, following numerous characters (some more prominent than others), in an elaborate, sometimes dizzying dance from D.C. to Iran and Afghanistan, as the author brings it all her pieces together. Her characters are wonderfully done, credible and fascinating each in their own way. I'm not sure I expected to be so totally mesmerized by this book, but the author carries us along, voyeurs to things usually unseen, and witnesses to the lives affected. It's hard to turn away. And yet, there were places where I got a bit lost, and there is something I can't quite identify that keeps me short of raving about the book (but please, don't let that stop you from reading it). ( )

A military pilot loses control over the Potomac and crash lands on Theodore Roosevelt Island. But was it an accident? An editor at the big Washington daily is curious and a Metro reporter eventually investigates. Meanwhile, a spooky type is feeling a little bad because the pilot is a woman and all he seems to have wanted to do was test his ability to remotely force a plane out of the sky, in case a terrorist gets a hold of it. Scene switches to Iran, where a nuclear engineer talks to his luggage, runs to a safe place, runs back, is possibly blown up in his hotel room. Back to the pilot, now out of Walter Reed and in Afghanistan, flying a nasty bomb drop and then going sledding. Tragedy happens. Back at the Post, erp, whatever it was named, a Woodward figure and a maybe Sally Quinn figure and the intrepid Metro night editor (night editors rock!) futz around, while the reporter sort of figures out the pilot crash story with the help of an underage prostitute. She also pinpoints the Important Facts buried in a Senate Intelligence Committee report that the Woodward guy may have had but was saving for his own book (okay that part rings true) and the sort-of Sally person had but was too wrapped up in her own drama to deal with it in a timely fashion. No matter. With the truth staring them in the collective eyeball, the AMEs still aren't buying the reporter's story, for vague reasons having nothing obvious to do with dead-trees and digital platforms.

Most of this isn't believable (really, would a Metro reporter drive out to NoVa and not first get her road directions straight?), although the adventures of Mary the Downed Pilot did keep me reading, even past the chapter with the nuke engineer, in which the fact that this is a Literary Novel was jammed down the reader's esophagus. ("During their one meeting...on a blasting cold sun of a morning, nothing moved Will's digit of a face." And, "Hoseyn couldn't summon his own phone number to mind. It felt as if he had a dowel in his cortex." And, "There was a knock at the door. It was a columnar noise.")

Ex-Postie Lorraine Adams might be trying to skewer people and things that deserve skewering, but to paraphrase a line from her effort: "[She] could have parachuted into the field of potatoes when it was in the onions where [she'd] been supposed to land." ( )