About the Author:
Dean Ing has worked as a USAF interceptor crew chief, a senior research engineer in the aerospace industry, a builder and driver of sports-racing cars, and a university professor. He has a doctorate in communications theory. Ing is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Ransom of Black Stealth One, The Nemesis Mission, and The Skins of Dead Men. He lives in Ashland, Oregon.
From Kirkus Reviews:
A feisty schoolteacher and a lively eight-year-old team up in this high-tech tale that works in spite of its techie pretensions. T.C., a.k.a. Teresa Contreras Rainey, a schoolteacher vacationing in Mexico, has a funny thing happen to her on the way to a day of scuba-diving. She bumps into a kidnappingand manages to thwart it. Soon it turns out that the intended victim, young Al Townsend, is no ordinary boy. Al, a.k.a. Talal, is heir to the throne of a Middle Eastern kingdom, a place from which his American mother has removed him. The ruler, his father, wants him back big time. The would-be kidnappers are not your garden-variety, down-and-dirty thugstheyre former CIA guys available for hirerent-a-spookswhose mission could not be simpler: grab the kid, kill whoever gets in the way. Though T.C. understands that this means her, the realization comes too late, as a ferocious maternal bonding has already taken place, the kind that forecloses all but one option: keep Al close; stand in for his dead mom against all threats to the boy, who soon comes to be a surrogate for the son lost to T.C. in an auto accident some years back. From Mexico to New Mexico, they fly in tandem, a hairsbreadth ahead of pursuit. T.C. collects some allies, among them Ross Downing, a resourceful government counter-spook. But the mercenaries descend in force, capture Al, and hie him off to their hideaway. Misnamed Saddletramp Ranch, its a hedonistic haven for diplomats with checkered pasts. Therein a flurry of technological cut and thrustall is finally and happily resolved. The obligatory high-tech seems forcedsupplied because that's what's called for in an Ing novel (Flying to Pieces, 1997, etc.). It's the no-tech that sustains interestT.C., Al, and a thoroughly likable supporting cast. (Radio satellite tour; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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