Corsair

Unlike Cambias’s promising and strikingly imaginative debut novel (A Darkling Sea), this sophomore effort has little appeal. David Schwartz, the self-styled “Captain Black, the Space Pirate,” parlays his computer skills into a lucrative criminal career, remotely redirecting valuable shipments of helium being sent from the Moon to Earth’s “hungry fusion power plants.” Unfortunately, one of his escapades attracts the attention of his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Santiago, now an Air Force officer, who identifies him as the culprit and, after a dramatic outburst, spends the rest of the book in a no-holds-barred effort to defeat him. Schwartz’s idea of the good life mostly involves bedding beautiful women and abetting serious bad guys, but the former soon bore him, and the latter try to kill him. Cambias’s easy familiarity with technology is not enough to save this book from its flat characters and sloppy plot; the loose ends are glaring and the twists are obvious to the reader long before Captain Black sees them coming. [em](May) [/em]