Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition (Initial Situation)
Party! With Opera.
Here's a party invite you don't get every day. An unnamed country in South America wants Japanese businessman Katsumi Hosokawa to do business with them. There's no better way to get someone to open a factory than to throw them a party, right? Well, in this case, there is: invite them to a party with opera, specifically Roxane Coss, Mr. Hosokawa's favorite opera singer.
It works, and when Mr. Hosokawa decides to show up, a bunch of investors and diplomats from other countries figure they'll get in on the investment action, too. Ta da! Instant party. (And instant international hostage situation when it all goes wrong, as we'll see in the Rising Action section.) Things are all set up for take-off once these details are in place.
Rising Action (Conflict, Complication)
Up Until the Punching, It Was a Real Nice Party.
So we have a bunch of international government officials and businesspeople all sitting at a dinner party, listening to opera. What could go wrong? Unless you're allergic to "Ride of the Valkyries," it all sounds safe enough.
But little do our characters know that a terrorist group is ready to kidnap the host country's president. One problem for the terrorists: the prez stayed home to watch his favorite soap opera. So when they rush in and don't find him, they're stuck with tons of international hostages. And that's how a weeks-long standoff begins. What happens inside the house during the hostage crisis is the main action of the book.
Of course, it has to get even more complicated than that. After the initial showdown and realization that this is going to take awhile, it feels at first like time has stopped and nothing is happening at all. And then, a community slowly begins to form.
In this book, the terrorists aren't so much evil manipulators intent on getting their way through unspeakable violence. They're mostly teenagers, and of the not-so-mean adult leaders, one used to be a teacher and is a pretty decent dude. The terrorists don't kill anyone in the course of the entire book, and most of them become friendly with the hostages—some of them more than friendly—while other people who wouldn't ordinarily know each other become close.
In this strange new world, Roxane Coss (opera singer) and Mr. Hosokawa (married Japanese businessman the party was for) fall in love, and so do Mr. Hosokawa's translator and a beautiful young woman named Carmen who happens to be one of the terrorists. Roxane Coss discovers that one of the terrorists can sing and is sure he's opera's equivalent of the next Bono, so she starts giving him voice lessons. Meanwhile, the government is secretly tunneling under the house to try to take it over. So just as people are making friends, falling in love, and discovering new worlds of music, they're also inevitably headed toward disaster.
Climax (Crisis, Turning Point)
But Everyone's Having Such a Good Time.
When this book hits the crisis, it hits it hard. Messner, the Red Cross guy negotiating between the terrorists and the host country's government, shows up with an urgent plea to everyone to resolve the situation. He knows the military is tunneling under the garden wall and will pop out with guns blazing any moment. We know it too, because the narrator tells us.
But the terrorists and the hostages don't know it. They've been lulled into a false sense of security, the leaders don't pay much attention to the negotiator, and they're all busy with much more interesting things like playing soccer or finishing up voice lessons. That's when the soldiers burst in and start shooting.
Falling Action
Dude! Where's My Falling Action?
This novel has almost no falling action. That's weird, huh? It's like one of those roller coasters that builds and builds and builds to a giant hill and then drops you down the track so fast you barely know when it's over. Once the soldiers burst in, we've hit the climax of the book and there's no going back. They're real speedy to shoot all the terrorists, including Gen's lover Carmen. They also accidentally kill Mr. Hosokawa, who happens to be near Carmen and throws himself in front of the bullets to protect her. And as the two of them fall lifeless to the ground, that's the end of the falling action, too. It's an abrupt end to a leisurely book, and it's meant to jolt the reader like the slammed-on brakes at the end of a ride.
Resolution (Denouement)
Four Funerals and a Wedding.
Okay, so there are a lot more than four funerals. But there is a wedding. After the sudden jolt of the massive slaughter of all these terrorists we've started to see as good, if slightly wayward, buddies, we do get the short Epilogue that tells us that Gen and Roxane marry each other, probably a few months later. They've both lost the people they loved in the time they were captives. Gen's lover Carmen was shot as a terrorist, and Roxane's lover Mr. Hosokawa got killed trying to protect Carmen. Oof.
But they've found something in each other. Their quiet wedding, witnessed by one other couple that survived the hostage crisis, is the end of the book. It ties up a few loose threads by telling us what happened to some of the other freed hostages, too, and wraps up on a slightly happier note than the bloodbath of Chapter 10. And that's it, folks.