Medusa's Child

Novelist and Alaska Airlines pilot Nance is a champ at dreaming up spellbinding premises (as in his bestselling Pandora's Clock) about doomsday threats lurking in our friendly skies. Regrettably, he also excels at sabotaging his great plot ideas with amateurish writing. When, two years after his death, the widow of a deranged nuclear scientist is charged with delivering to the Pentagon a prototype of a Medusa Wave generator, capable of creating a devastating continent-sized electromagnetic pulse, she finds herself the victim of a diabolical plot to kill millions of innocent people and virtually destroy our computerized civilization. With the Medusa device counting down the minutes until it detonates the 20 megaton nuke that keys its power, the widow, a crew of three pilots and a beautiful young female scientist are trapped aboard a Boeing 727 cargo plane, desperately trying to figure out how to disarm the device while battling the onslaught of an 800-mile-wide hurricane. Inane prose (""She gripped his seatback even harder...triggering sensations he didn't have time to consider, but which somehow inside he knew were very pleasant""), cartoonish characters and comic-book theatrics (a mid-air rescue from the wing of a 727)) abound as Nance parlays a clever idea into an unintentional homage to the slapstick film lampoon, Airplane. Crichton's Airframe is a Concorde compared to this crippled bird. Author tour. (Feb.)