Final Orbit

Space program veteran Santy Santich suspects a NASA cover-up when an astronaut dies horribly on a routine space shuttle flight, but his place on the next shuttle is in jeopardy, and the countdown to liftoff with a killer has already begun. Original.

Shirish V. Date was born in Pune, India, in 1964, emigrating to the United States at age 3 with his parents. He attended public schools in Waltham, Mass., Rochester, N.Y., and Anaheim, Calif., before earning a bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford University in 1985.

Date was editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily student newspaper, and has been a professional journalist ever since. He has covered criminal courts for the Middletown (N.Y.) Times-Herald Record, first Daytona Beach and then NASA for the Orlando Sentinel, and Florida state government for the Associated Press and the Palm Beach Post.

In 1994, Date and his wife sailed their 31-foot-cutter, Sounion, from Florida across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean as far as Puerto Mahon in the Balearic Islands. They spent a year at sea, returning to Florida by way of the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, the Windward and Leeward Islands of the Caribbean, and finally the Bahamas.

It was on that sailing sabbatical that Date wrote his first novel, Final Orbit, a murder mystery set aboard NASA's space shuttle Columbia. It was published by Avon in 1997. His second novel, Speed Week, is a darkly comic thriller based on his experiences in Daytona Beach. It was published by Putnam in 1999. His sailing articles have appeared in Sailing, Cruising World and Sail magazines.

Date is now the capital bureau chief for the Palm Beach Post. He lives in Tallahassee with his wife and two sons.