Saucer

January 28, 2002
A flight of fancy and a departure from Coonts's bestselling techno-thrillers (Flight of the Intruder, etc.) pits an eager young grad student against seasoned military, government and corporate raider types for control of an ancient flying saucer dug out of a sandstone outcrop in the Sahara. Rip Cantrell is acting as gofer for a seismic survey when a glint of metal in the sand catches his eye. Aided by archeologists from a nearby dig, he unearths the ship, but the U.S. Air Force UFO team shows up followed shortly by armed thugs sent by Australian mogul Roger Hedrick. When the Libyan army appears on the scene as well, Rip and test pilot Capt. Charlotte (Charley) Pine manage to hijack the controls of the saucer, evading all their pursuers and flying to the Missouri farm of Rip's Uncle Egg, "inventor, wizard, mechanic extraordinaire." Egg cues Charley and Rip to the saucer's advanced flight capabilities, and they make decoy runs to mask their real location. But Hedrick tracks them down, and Charley is forced by a Hedrick operative to fly the saucer to the mogul's Australian ranch. Rip heads Down Under with rescue in mind when the UFO team (previously in Libyan captivity) are set free and tell all on TV, forcing Hedrick to change plans. He puts the saucer up for sale to one lucky nation, but has a sinister plan that Charley vows to disrupt. The moves get more deadly as the bidding begins, and Rip comes on the scene for a predictably spectacular ending. More Cussler than Clancy, this cartoonish slice of escapism is also more hokey than suspenseful ("But saucers do
exist. There one is!"); still, it's tough to put down. Major ad/promo.

February 24, 2014
Coonts belatedly concludes his lackluster Saucer trilogy (following 2003’s Saucer and 2006’s Saucer: The Conquest) with a burst of unlikely fireworks and a thud. Doughty engineering student Rip Cantrell discovered a flying saucer in the Sahara desert, aided by lovely former Air Force test pilot Charlotte Pine and Rip’s brilliant inventor uncle, Arthur “Egg” Cantrell. A year later, the team is called in to study another saucer embedded in the Great Barrier Reef. Meanwhile, pharma mogul Harrison Douglas has retrieved the Roswell spaceship, which was stolen from Area 51. When Douglas’s saucer expert, Adam Solo, steals the spaceship, Douglas vows revenge. Solo allies with Rip and his friends, revealing he is an alien marooned on Earth for over a thousand years, and he uses Rip’s Sahara spaceship, to call for help, but they’ll all need to hide from U.S. government agents and Harrison until rescue arrives in one week’s time. Tissue-thin characters and heavy-handed plotting make this forgettable story one of Coonts’s less successful outings.

August 9, 2004
In this humorous UFO thriller, the sequel to bestseller Coonts's Saucer
(2003), pilot Charlotte "Charley" Pine is hired to fly a French spaceplane to the moon, where millionaire Pierre Artois is building a base. Once there, she discovers that Artois has equipped the base with an antigravity beam projector and plans to make himself and his malevolent wife, Julie, rulers of the world. Charley promptly returns to Earth to warn everybody. Meanwhile, Newton Chadwick, a mad scientist in the pay of the French, kidnaps saucer-expert Egg Cantrell and forces him to fly to the moon in the original Roswell saucer that landed in 1947. Egg's nephew Rip Cantrell and Charley steal another flying saucer from the Smithsonian, and soon saucers and other borrowed alien high-tech are in pitched battle over the moon. Later, French pilot Jean-Paul Lalouette (perhaps the book's most engaging character) is determined to go down fighting and nearly turns the tables in a gripping aerial duel of saucers up and down the East Coast. Cartoonish characters with names like Senator Blohardt and Joe Bob Hooker add to the fun. Agent, Robert Gottlieb.