Media Contact: Don Vallee | donvallee.author@gmail.com
Austin, Texas
Retired IT professional and instrument-rated pilot Don Vallee drew on 30 years in technology and thousands of hours in the cockpit to write Flying Into Darkness — a novel about a man whose childhood trauma, crumbling marriage, and newfound freedom in the sky converge into something no one around him sees coming.
AUSTIN, Texas — Don Vallee knows what it sounds like when a stall warning horn goes off at 1,200 feet. He knows the procedure for contacting approach control over Glens Falls, the feeling of a crosswind pushing a Piper Cherokee sideways on short final, and the specific radio frequency you’d dial to light up a dark runway at an uncontrolled airfield in rural Pennsylvania.
He also knows, from three decades in information technology, exactly how a skilled data professional could exploit digital patterns to locate strangers online without leaving a trace.
He put both of those things into one character. The result is Flying Into Darkness, his debut novel, published by Parker Publishers.
What the novel is about
Evan Williams killed his father at age nine to protect his mother from a beating. He served eight years in juvenile detention, had his record sealed, and built a quiet life as a data architect in Albany, New York. He married a woman named Jenna. They bought a house near the airport. For twenty years, nothing about their life suggested what was underneath.
When Evan’s mother is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he begins spending weeks on Long Island caring for her. Jenna, left alone for months, joins an online infidelity platform and begins meeting a younger man. To fill Evan’s own time, she researches flight schools and signs him up for lessons at a local outfit called TIME2FLY. It’s meant as a gift. It becomes something else.
Evan earns his pilot’s certificate, starts volunteering for a medical transport nonprofit, and discovers a sense of freedom he hasn’t felt since childhood. Then he finds out about the affair. The childhood trauma he spent 25 years burying resurfaces — and now he has the skills, the mobility, and the emotional justification to act on it. He begins using his airplane and his data expertise to track and target women from the infidelity site across the Northeast.
Why the details feel different in this one
Vallee, 67, is an instrument-rated private pilot based in Austin. The distinction matters. Most thrillers that involve small aircraft treat flying as set dressing — a character hops in a plane and lands somewhere. In Flying Into Darkness, the aviation is structural. Readers experience the full learning curve: the introductory flight over Lake George, the ground school sessions, the first solo, the nerve of communicating with air traffic control for the first time. The airplane isn’t a prop. It’s the mechanism that makes the crimes possible and the escape attempt plausible.
The technology layer is similarly grounded. Vallee spent his career in IT, and his protagonist’s methods for locating victims reflect a real understanding of data architecture, digital footprints, and pattern recognition. The investigative process on the law enforcement side — tracking credit card transactions at fuel pumps, requesting FAA radar assistance, coordinating across jurisdictions — follows real procedural logic rather than fictional shortcuts.
The marriage at the center
Beneath the thriller mechanics, the novel spends considerable time inside a marriage that is falling apart in the most ordinary way. Evan makes scrambled eggs in the morning while Jenna checks messages from another man in the shower. They eat breakfast in silence. She tells him she’s working late; he orders pizza and watches crime documentaries alone in his recliner. He rubs her back in bed; she rolls over and says she’s tired.
Vallee doesn’t write Jenna as a villain. She’s lonely, neglected during a difficult period, and genuinely conflicted about what she’s doing. She still keeps her wedding rings in a jewelry box after the divorce. She still has a framed photo of the two of them at Lake George on her fireplace mantel. The novel’s tension comes not from simplifying these people but from refusing to.
A climax that unfolds at altitude
The novel’s final act plays out almost entirely in flight. When Evan spots a line of police cars waiting on the tarmac at Albany International, he aborts the landing and disappears. He shuts off his transponder, drops to 500 feet, and follows the Hudson River south past Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. The FBI can’t find a plane to follow him. State Police helicopters are unavailable. Law enforcement is left tracking fuel purchases and waiting.
He flies to his ex-wife in Philadelphia. Then he flies north toward the Adirondacks and aims the airplane at the side of Whiteface Mountain. At the last possible moment, his body overrides his decision. His hands pull back the yoke. The landing gear scrapes treetops. He survives.
He refuels in Lake Placid, contacts the tower, and asks them to tell the police he’s coming in. His final landing in Albany is the smoothest he’s ever made.
About Don Vallee
Vallee retired from a long career in information technology and holds an instrument rating as a private pilot. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Michele Matzen. Outside of writing, the two work as background actors and extras in film and television across central Texas under the name Cast-a-Couple — a brand they created together and maintain on Instagram and Facebook.
The book is dedicated to his stepdaughter, Mercedes Matzen, whom he describes as “a beautiful and compassionate soul taken much too soon.”
Flying Into Darkness is his first novel.
Publication Details
Title: Flying Into Darkness
Author: Don Vallee
Publisher: Parker Publishers
Genre: Fiction / Thriller
Copyright © 2025 Don Vallee | First Edition
Don Vallee is available for interviews and media appearances.
Contact: donvallee.author@gmail.com
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