HERE ONE MOMENT, by Liane Moriarty

Nine novels in, Liane Moriarty’s output falls somewhere between empire and institution: a reliable bastion of breezy yet propulsive storytelling, smartly informed by relevant issues of the day (infertility, wellness culture, domestic abuse). Her books claim prime real estate at chain stores and airports kiosks and regularly go on to become glossy television fodder, more often than not fronted by her fellow Australian Nicole Kidman (see “Big Little Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers” and the upcoming “The Last Anniversary,” which she’ll produce).

At the same time, Moriarty is still consigned to the metaphorical broom closet of “women’s fiction” — dismissed as something less than literature or damned with faint pink praise. Never mind that her latest, the busy but unhurried “Here One Moment,” is as demographically diverse as a phone book. Granted, it helps when your character pool is pulled from a flight manifest: a short domestic plane ride between the sunny Tasmanian capital of Hobart and Sydney.

Or it should have been short, except for a two-hour delay that leaves passengers tetchy and frazzled, each one caught up in the private drama of mislaid plans. Among them: the 40-ish engineer missing his daughter’s grammar-school “Lion King”; the contract lawyer turned bleary stay-at-home mom left to wrangle a screaming infant and a vomitous toddler; and the beautiful flight attendant spending perhaps her worst birthday on the tarmac, distributing “light snacks” and strained apologies in between desperate rummages for a tampon.

Into this maelstrom of ordinary inconvenience arrives someone who may or may not be extraordinary: a quiet woman, neatly dressed and with hair “the soft silver of an expensive kitten,” who stands up in her seat 45 minutes after takeoff. “I expect catastrophic stroke,” she proclaims with no particular flair, pointing to a preoccupied 50-something man on a laptop. “Age 72.” And so it goes down the rows, the solemn finger of fate: Heart disease, age 84; cardiac arrest, age 91; diabetes, age 79.

Her impromptu performance might be dismissed as a kooky parlor game by the passengers whose presumptive ends still lie decades away, but it is less amusing to the ones given more immediate and violent fates: workplace accident, age 43; assault, age 30; intimate partner homicide, age 25. Even the baby on board, blameless except for the screaming, receives his sentence; drowning, age 7.