Saucer: Savage Planet

Coonts belatedly concludes his lackluster Saucer trilogy (following 2003’s Saucer and 2006’s Saucer: The Conquest) with a burst of unlikely fireworks and a thud. Doughty engineering student Rip Cantrell discovered a flying saucer in the Sahara desert, aided by lovely former Air Force test pilot Charlotte Pine and Rip’s brilliant inventor uncle, Arthur “Egg” Cantrell. A year later, the team is called in to study another saucer embedded in the Great Barrier Reef. Meanwhile, pharma mogul Harrison Douglas has retrieved the Roswell spaceship, which was stolen from Area 51. When Douglas’s saucer expert, Adam Solo, steals the spaceship, Douglas vows revenge. Solo allies with Rip and his friends, revealing he is an alien marooned on Earth for over a thousand years, and he uses Rip’s Sahara spaceship, to call for help, but they’ll all need to hide from U.S. government agents and Harrison until rescue arrives in one week’s time. Tissue-thin characters and heavy-handed plotting make this forgettable story one of Coonts’s less successful outings. (Apr.)