Starfire

Bestseller Brown's exciting 19th entry in his loosely connected techno-thriller series (after 2012's Tiger Claw) focuses on Bradley McLanahan. As a precocious and well-connected engineering student at California Polytechnic State University, Bradley devises, with the help of his brilliant team of young scientists and fellow classmates, the blueprint for Starfire, an unparalleled source of solar energy in Earth's spatial orbit. The project at first sounds like a teenager's imaginative daydream, yet President Kenneth Phoenix's intention to turn the Armstrong Space Station into a weapon of mass destruction suddenly puts Bradley in the crosshairs of the dangerous Russian government. Entangled in a potentially catastrophic war stretching to the outer reaches of space, Bradley and his friends must formulate a new plan%E2%80%94one that could potentially save all mankind. While encumbered by too much jargon and a dizzying number of characters and plot developments, the novel does manage in its descriptions of spaceships, warfare, and the so-called "final frontier." (May)