Another good one from Aldrin and Barnes. Not a sequel to their first book, alas, but a good story well written. ( )

The Return is a tale about the kind of space adventure that could happen today--and that will happen tomorrow. As told by Buzz Aldrin, who's been there...and who's already helped change the world.
Former astronaut Scott Blackstone's dream of opening outer space to visits from everyday people is under attack. His pilot program has been marred by a fatal accident, he's out of a job, and he's being sued for a billions dollars. And it's beginning to seem that the "accident" wasn't at all accidental.
Then the endless conflict between India and Pakistan heats up...and Pakistan explodes a nuclear device in the upper atmosphere, frying electronics on earth and in space, and putting the crew of the international Space Station at risk. With the Shuttle fleet grounded, only a secret skunkworks project known to Scott and his old friends can save the space station's stranded crew.

Another good one from Aldrin and Barnes. Not a sequel to their first book, alas, but a good story well written. ( )

i read the book because Buzz Aldrin was a co-author and was curious to hear what he had to say in this novel. Overall the message is that the future of spaceflight is best left in the hands of private enterprise. The characters of the novel were two dimentional and the plot was not very compelling. The book does not withstand the passage of time and seems hopelessly dated in 2011. Hasn't diminished my esteem for Buzz, but its not for being an author that he is best known. ( )

There is a decent story at the core of this book, but what ought to be exciting — mysterious accidents, high-profile lawsuits, the crippling of the world's entire orbital capability, a race against time to save brave astronauts — is rendered terminally dull by the bland and awkward writing.

Much of the story is recounted, not experienced: the narrators explain to the reader what is happening, or what happened, with passionless voice. Neither death threats nor serious accident to a loved one nor global catastrophe nor escape from legal concerns conjures much in the way of emotion. Much of the story unfolds in business meetings concerning lawyers and upper-management businessmen: fine if you're John Grisham, but an odd choice for a space-saboteur story.

The stoic characters share the narrative, as the authors made the dangerous choice to rotate among three first-person perspectives as the book unfolds. My opinion is that this should never be done without very good reason. If done well (e.g., Faulkner's [The Sound and the Fury]), it can be very effective; more often than not, though, it jars the reader out of the story and just looks amateurish. In this case, there is no evident reason to switch from Scott's perspective to Thalia's to Nick's and back to Thalia's. Indeed, none of them have any dimensionality; without their little name tags at the beginning of a section to show who's speaking, there would be no way of distinguishing one narrator from another. The choice of narrator also seems quite arbitrary at times, bearing no relation to the action at hand. Thus the reader occasionally encounters odd combinations, such as a human rights lawyer expounding on the physics of radiation and the Earth's magnetic field. The first narrator the reader encounters is sidelined for most of the remaining story, with the other characters playing more important roles.

All in all, I can't recommend this book. I did finish it. As I said, the story itself is .. okay (though the revelation of the local villain comes as no surprise), but ultimately, it's not worth the trouble to dig it out from under the writing. ( )