Well this was certainly a departure for Coonts. I read this right after Pirate Alley , and no book could be more different. It's preposterous of course, but I loved it. I'm a SF fan, but most of what passes for SF these days is pure rubbish. This one isn't. Light reading to be sure , but very entertaining nonetheless. It's 50 years since I was a teenager but this sent me back in time. Its simply a fun read. I wish the PPL had the 2 follow-on books in the series. There is now a Saucer Trilogy.

Aliens are coming! A year after young engineering student Rip Cantrell discovered the first flying saucer buried deep in the sands of the Sahara, another saucer is brought up from the bottom of the Atlantic. The recovery is funded by a pharmaceutical executive who believes that the saucer holds the key to an anti-aging drug formula that space travelers would need to voyage between galaxies. But one of his technicians, Adam Solo, an alien marooned on Earth for a thousand years, steals the saucer, hoping to summon a starship to rescue him. Unfortunately, the stolen saucer has damaged communications gear. Solo goes to Rip Cantrell and his partner, ex-Air Force test pilot Charlotte "Charley" Pine, and Rip's uncle Egg, for help in summoning a starship. Science Fiction newsletter December 2015

I happened to select this book immediately after completing the book "Germline" by Erlick Nelson. After the complexity of Germline, I was *initially* hit with the simplicity of this book. I thought they had labelled it incorrectly and that it was really junior fiction, not adult fiction. I'm not sure if this was due to Germline however, you have to judge this for yourself.

After getting over this initial bump the story turned out okay. Not fantastic, not bad, hunce 3 stars.

It achieves in a flying saucer book exactly what I would have wanted.
There are too many saucer books/movies, where this piece of amazing tech just sits there, no one taking it for a spin. If I were to find one, I would try and power it use the thing. This book did this which pleased me immensely.

Book two looks to be shaping up to be even better.

Worth a read for the pure fun of the story, or if you would like to imagine what you would do if you found a saucer. Probably not the book for you if your spend your leisure time analyzing the semantics and complexity of a work instead of enjoying a relaxing read.