I believe I first met James Glass at LepreCon 44. I was doing a reading in the ConSuite and, when I got there early, he was doing one himself. He sounded interesting, so I bought whichever book of his that he'd recommend to a first-time reader and he suggested this one. He's attended a few of our other local cons since and only became more interesting in ways that speak directly to what's in this book.

On one side, he has a serious scientific background, as a professor of physics and astronomy who's focused on molecular biophysics and superconductivity, with five years working on commercial arc jet and ion propulsion systems. On the other side, his wife Gail is a dance therapist who speaks on alternative medicine and crystal healing. How does all that translate into a novel? Well, he sets it in Sedona, the new age capital of America, which apparently also contains a secret military base. The two sides are both pivotal to the story and, just like James and Gail, somehow work very well together.

I'm not a hundred per cent sure that they live or have lived in Arizona, but they've clearly spent a lot of time here, part of that engaging with the local writing community, and this book is also set in Arizona, so I think it ought to count as my Arizona book for September, even if I'm not sure how best to categorise it. The publisher's website calls it a science fiction novel, which it certainly ends up as, but for the most part it unfolds as a technological thriller, with plenty of action, drama and even romance. In some ways, one obvious comparison would be Craig Thomas' 'Firefox', because the MacGuffin of the story is a highly advanced plane.

Initially, I wasn't totally sold because Glass starts out simply, patiently and carefully, and I had to wonder if that was going to be a problem when it came to the action. It isn't. The patience works and the tension builds as it should. My other problem is a little unfair, because it's really not the story itself that's at fault but the back cover blurb, which may well not be Glass's work. It plays up a science fiction angle that really doesn't come into play much until late in the book and tells us a few things that we'd be better off discovering for ourselves.

For instance, the lead is Eric Price, who we ought to see as the good guy, a troubleshooter sent in by Gil Norton, an old friend and close advisor to the President of the United States, to see what's going wrong with Operation Shooting Star, run out of that secret base in Sedona. We should also see him as a little shadowy, because, while Glass tells us a lot about him, he's careful to not tell us even more. This helps build that tension because very few people he'll work with knows precisely who he is or even what agency he works for.

Certainly his most obvious colleague, Leon Newell, a similarly shadowy figure who works for the government but not in any specific capacity Glass wants to tell us about in the early chapters, has much idea about who Price is and he carefully fishes for as much information as he can. Newell is undercover as an art dealer and Price's front is that he's been sent up from Phoenix to work more closely with him in Sedona. Had I not read the back cover blurb first, I'm sure this ambiguity would have played much better.

There are other key players and, without seeming to overtly deepen them, Glass delineates them wonderfully so that we have absolutely no problem following everything seamlessly enough that we can focus on the smaller details. The most obvious are Col. Alex Davis and Nataly Hegel.

Davis is the commander of the secret base, a career military man who I imagined to be rather like Gen. Hammond in 'Stargate SG-1' but with much more bluster and perhaps fewer ethics. Nataly is the love interest for Eric, as beautiful and rich as we might expect, but she's also much more than that. She has a serious role to play in proceedings, on the new age side of the fence. While she's a rich enough woman to not need to work, she runs a new age store in Sedona, so can prepare Price for some of what's to come in ways that the military and government couldn't viably do.

Others I'll let you discover for yourself, both in who they are and in who turns out to be important in ways not immediately obvious. I enjoyed trying to figure that out as I went. Given that the back cover blurb mentions alien races, I'll touch on that too, because we see more than the characters do about who provided the advanced technology being examined in Operation Shooting Star and so we never buy into their belief that they're either Eastern Europeans or Russians. Even if I had left the back cover blurb alone and dived in blind, I'd still have seen them as aliens and the plane something a little more science fiction than these grounded professionals believe.

If I have a minor quibble to throw out, it's that these aliens, whose council meetings we sit in on, seem to identify by party in a way similar to our democractic political structures, and each of the parties is identified by colour to emphasise that: the Reds, the Blues and the Greens. Given that they're first brought up by the American president, the majority of the readers of this book are likely to start thinking in terms of Republicans, Democrats and, well, the Green Party, and that's not remotely helpful. These aren't American parties and these names shouldn't colour our take on what they stand for, pun well and truly not intended.

The best scenes for me involve the MacGuffin itself. Glass has industry experience with propulsion systems and it shows. He wisely avoids technobabble, keeping experimental scenes with the plane just as grounded to a regular reader as the budding romance between Eric and Nataly. However, he still gets across how advanced the plane is and how dangerous it is to be fiddling around with it without the benefit of a manual. These scenes are another place in which Glass's careful approach pays dividends. The intrigue isn't perhaps as deep as it might seem, especially with only one real candidate for villain, but he's careful there too and it does its job.

All in all, 'Sedona Conspiracy' is a surprisingly easy book to like, given that it mixes hard science in a technological framework with new age philosophies, with Nataly's world full of healing crystals, Tibetan throat singing and conversations with yourself on a higher plane. Typically, readers into the science would dismiss the new age stuff and the new age folk wouldn't care about the science. Glass's biggest achievement here is to make these two sides work together in one coherent story, perhaps managed because he's achieved exactly the same thing in his marriage. It's not difficult to see Price as a wish fulfilment version of Glass himself and Nataly as a wish fulfilment version of his wife Gail.

And so, whenever I bump into him next at an Arizona convention, whether he's driving down from Sedona or flying in from Spokane, I'll happily pick up a stack of his other books. ~~ Hal C F Astell