Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Freefall

Free Fall

Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Pocket, March 2005, $7.99, 556 pp.

ISBN 0743406079

After a year of training to use manipulative systems to gather the cylinders containing moon dust and rocks that the rover collected, civilian Cory Rey considered her mission a success and knows her boss Kai Teller of TTI industries will be pleased. The rocks and dust are worth over $100 million dollars and he will make a huge profit at auction. From the time that Cory completes her mission, things go wrong. The science officer tries to kill her in order to take the cylinders; the shuttle and the space station are badly damaged in a crash that kills all but three people.

The cosmonauts on the Soyuz rescue Cory after a near fatal accident and she brings back with her one of the cylinders that someone was willing to kill to possess. Inside are the petrified remains of three human fingers but supposedly nobody ever died on the moon. Captain Mitch Webber of the secret United States Space Force is sent to the moon to cover up what a certain faction of the government wants kept secret, but he is in a race with the Chinese who plan to reveal what the U.S. government did over three decades ago.

Webber is sent on the mission without all the facts and once he discovers what he is really supposed to do, he has to decide between taking the legal or the moral course. This is an action thriller that starts off at light speed and than races at an even greater velocity towards the startling climax and resolution. The team of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens has written a fine tale that will appeal to fans of Tom Clancy and Jack Higgins.

Harriet Klausner