Walter J. Boyne, Supersonic Thunder

Supersonic Thunder

Walter J. Boyne

Forge, Jan 2007, $24.95

ISBN: 0765308436

The Great War has been over for a decade but a new Cold War between the Soviet Communist blocs and the West is frighteningly on the brink of turning hot with atomic weapons that will make the fire bombings and the two atom bomb blasts of WWII look like a picnic. In this new world order of hostile rivalry with both sides wanting to bury the opponent, competition is on the land, sea and air.

The American aviation industry with powerful political pressure and support knows they must re-engineer (anachronism that fits) their design to produce faster and more mobile fighter jets and a spy plane that can take pictures of Russian activity, but fly above radar. In that environs, family patriarch Vance Shannon and his twin sons, Tom and Harry, work on the new technology that leads to spy planes, supersonic jets and other flying vessels but it is Sputnik that changes the interrelation dynamics.

Though the plot is thin, the storyline is exciting and faster than an SST as Walter J. Boyne uses a family of flying aces aviation engineers to showcase the Cold War in the sky circa 1955- 1973 (Nixon is the bookends). Readers will feel the pressure that every Russian advancement and every Khrushchev shoe-stomping bravado causes the Americans to feel inadequate and in need to do more than keep up if they are to win the Cold War, which is at one of its prime peaks of enmity. SUPERSONIC THUNDER provides insight into the beginnings of the Jet Age as former enemies from WWII become bedfellows while former allies become deadly adversaries in a changing world that is difficult for people living during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations to comprehend as they did not have this entertaining novel to guide them.

Harriet Klausner