The Fire Ship - Hardcover

Tonkin, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517582678 ISBN 13: 9780517582671

Publisher: Crown, 1992

Synopsis

While on a rare vacation on a cruise ship, Richard and Robin Mariner stumble upon a terrorist plot to strangle the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. By the author of The Coffin Ship. 12,500 first printing.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Middle Eastern terrorists make it necessary for shipping magnates Richard and Robin Mariner, who last sailed in The Coffin Ship (1991), to break off their vacation and go to war. The fiends have seized the Mariners' flagship and Robin's father. Rich people do have the most interesting vacations. Sunning themselves in the Seychelles, Mr. and Mrs. Mariner chance to see the highest-tech sailboat afloat and casually sign themselves on as crew. The boat belongs to its inventor--a brilliant, brain-damaged, Aussie Vietnam vet--and his black American best friend, both of whom are happy to find that the Mariners are, beyond being stellar sailors, filthy rich and most interested in the boat's futuristic features. Answering an SOS in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the four sailors find an abandoned, weapon-laden freighter and a lifeboat with a murdered crew. Sailing for Arabia with their news, the Mariners hear on the radio that terrorists have hijacked the Mariners' best new tanker and kidnapped Robin's father. As soon as they reach Bahrain, Robin and Richard call on the resources of their shipping company and all their most valiant chums to retrieve Dad and the ship. None of the world's intelligence agencies has any idea where the terrorists have taken their prizes--but none of the world's intelligence agencies has the money or connections of the Mariners, who are quickly on the trail. Everything's terribly risky, mind you. It is the Middle East, after all. But a visit to a blind mystic begins to clear things up, and the Mariners realize that the kidnapping, the hijacking, and the mysteriously abandoned ship are all related. Everybody joins the couple, who plan their own private, commando operation to get things set right. Brisk, dashing, pleasantly brainless British adventure. Action always prevails over politics. As it should. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Summer 1990 in the Persian Gulf: A small band of unidentified Arabs hijacks Prometheus II , flagship supertanker of the Heritage Mariner oiler fleet. Sir William Heritage flies from London to Bahrain and is immediately kidnapped. His daughter Robin and son-in-law Richard Mariner are on the Indian Ocean aboard the experimental multihull ship Kat a pult when they and Katapult' s two inventors, an Australian and an American, come upon an abandoned, smoking tanker that has been attacked by aircraft. Although the object of many frights and speculations, the fire ship never figures in the story, which follows this small group, eventually expanding to include three more Americans and an Arab, as they wrest Prometheus from the terrorists. But after finding the tanker without the hostages or villains, the rescuers continue on, in a bloody finale, to rescue the crew members, who are held on an abandoned oil rig at the mouth of the Gulf. The book teems with cheap cliff-hangers (the "hand that grasped at his leg" belongs to a corpse that "had tangled its rigid fingers in Richard's clothing"), amazing coincidences (the villain is Richard's godson, who is paid by the father of the villain's unknowing top aide, who is twin to Prometheus 's medic) and an incredible absence of references to Iraq in August 1990. Nevertheless, Tonkin's ( The Coffin Ship ) latest has explosive movie potential and is likely to sell very well.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0517582678
• ISBN 13: 9780517582671
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 289