Stephen Coonts, Saucer: The Conquest

Saucer: The Conquest

Stephen Coonts

St. Martin's, Sep 2004, $14.95, 352 pp.

ISBN: 03123262X

After the adventures in SAUCER, Rip Cantrell and his girlfriend Charley Pine donated the flying saucer to the Air and Space Museum. A bored Charley accepts Pierce Artois' offer to pilot a space plane to the moon to bring supplies to the station being built there. While she is on the space plane, Charley notices inside a locked compartment an object marked with a radioactive warning label; nothing on the manifest indicates that anything radioactive is on the ship.

On the moon, Artois and his associates are building a mysterious machine that disturbs Charley. She soon learns that they are constructing an antigravity beam that will destroy anything in its path even from the distance to Earth. Artois wants to be emperor of the world and he has a good chance of succeeding. Charley hijacks a space plane and returns to Earth. She and Rip steal back the donated saucer so that they can try to destroy Artois' fleet leaving him stranded on Luna, rescue his abducted uncle, and ultimately obliterate the weapon of mass destruction.

SAUCER: THE CONQUEST is a rip-roaring space adventure novel filled with a dashing hero and a courageous female champion, vile villains ready to commit genocide for power, and numerous space battles that make Star Wars look like a romance. Rip is a modern day Flash Gordon leaping from one adventure into another while Charley is the only person who can out leap Rip yet keep him somewhat on an even keel. Gifted Stephen Coonts provides an innovative yet in some ways old fashioned space tale that will appeal to anyone who enjoys the Star Wars sagas.

Harriet Klausner