"appeal to fans of Tom Clancy and Jack Higgins"

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

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted February 26, 2005

Summary

THE PLACE The International Space Station. Docked to it, the Space Shuttle Constitution. Crewed by ten astronauts trained to recover the $100-million cargo aboard the first privately launched lunar sample-return mission.

THE EVENT Sabotage. The containers from the Moon hold more than rocks and moondust, and there are those who are willing to kill to keep that knowledge from the world.

So begins the riveting new novel by acclaimed writing team Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens -- a relentless tale of high-tech conspiracy and suspense that reaches back to the darkest secrets of the space race of the 1960s, and ahead to the startling new technologies that will drive us to the Moon in the next decade.

Freefall marks the long-awaited return of the heroes of Icefire -- the Reeves-Stevens novel Stephen King hailed as: "The best suspense novel of its kind since The Hunt for Red October."

Now U.S. Navy Captain Mitch Webber, outspoken oceanographer Cory Rey, and Air Force Major Wilhemina Bailey of the United States Space Command are reunited in an even more harrowing adventure that pits them against the ruthless inheritors of a staggering conspiracy that could change history.

From the covert infiltration of China's most secure aerospace facility and the stirring heroism of astronauts and cosmonauts confronting disaster in space, to sudden violence on ordinary suburban streets and the startling revelation of America's most secret space program, Freefall is a nonstop explosive read that in true Reeves-Stevens fashion makes readers wonder where truth ends and fiction begins.