July 28, 2003
This brisk, if conventional, entry in Brown and DeFelice's jargon-filled series of military thrillers (Dale Brown's Dreamland: Nerve Center, etc.) takes a team of high-tech pilots from Dreamland, an aerospace weapons-testing facility, to sea. Piranha, an underwater robot capable of surveillance and attack, opens its career by outmaneuvering a Naval carrier. It quickly graduates from the testing phase, however, when a crisis in the China sea erupts and a Dreamland team—including Col. Dog Bastian, his daughter Capt. Breanna Stockard and her husband, wheelchair-bound Zen Stockard—is assigned to keep an eye on the goings-on between India and China. The simple mission heats up when the Dreamlanders get into a fray with the Chinese, who are anxious to test some secret machinery of their own. The authors describe each advanced weapon in such detail that readers, had they the tools, could conceivably build their own arsenal. Though these details bog down the narrative at times, the story thankfully slams into overdrive midway through. All in all, the book's overwhelming number of acronyms may discourage new readers, but fans of the series should have no complaints.
May 14, 2001
Few novelists can craft an aerial battle scene more strategically than former U.S. Air Force Capt. Brown (Warrior Class, etc.), and he and DeFelice (Coyote Bird) are in fine form here. Set deep in the Nevada desert, Dreamland is the place where top minds converge to develop cutting-edge artillery and aircraft. The discovery of a spy among the ranks of Dreamland's top pilots unnerves the elite air force personnel assigned to the base and starts a downward spiral in spirits. When Lt. Col. Tecumseh "Dog" Bastian is appointed to keep Dreamland off the Pentagon's chopping block, morale is at an all-time low. Bastian's daughter, Capt. Breanna Bastian Stockard, is one of Dreamland's best pilots, as was her husband, Maj. Jeff "Zen" Stockard, before a training mishap landed him in a wheelchair. Together, father, daughter and son-in-law lead a team into battle-torn Somalia using the Megafortress test bomber, securing Dreamland's funding and restoring its dignity. In such a technically charged story, the sheer number of characters—inconsistently referred to by their nicknames and real names—parading in and out of the narrative only creates confusion. Although experienced military-thriller readers will marvel at the fast pace of this novel, novices may be left behind.