Follow up to The Sirius Crossing, with Jack being reluctantly drawn into an attempt to rescue his friend's daughter from the hands of a drug baron, and having to travel to North America and Mexico in the process

As well as Jack, we also meet several other of the characters from the previous book, and so the "team" is largely familiar. Again, the story is a bit far-fetched, and again the reason for reading it is not so much the plot as the set piece chase sequences, which are pretty gripping. In the course of their adventures, Jack and friends infiltrate a well guarded mansion and manage to escape, endure a lengthy chase through a forgotten stretch of New York subway, and engage in jungle combat in Mexico. All of these scenes are great stuff.

Again, I thought the writing style was a bit hackneyed (we got bullets stitching through the air a couple more times) and I'm sure some of the sentences should have been edited or re-written to avoid repetition of words (e.g. "The interior of the building was an enourmous six-storey spiral with a ground floor space in the middle and galleries leading off each turn of the spiral. We took a service lift to the top floor of the spiral". Surely there must be other words for "spiral" he could have used) and the sub-themes of family bonds and romance with Deidre didn't add much. But it was worth reading for the helter-skelter thrills of the adventure.

Completed : 23-Jun-2004 (audiobook)