STEAMDRAGON — Stephen Brown

Romance, suspense and hi-tech engineering highlight this new science fiction novel. The Pendragon was the ultimate product of 1950s advances in engineering/ A revolutionary steam locomotive, it mysteriously crashed on its first run, claiming many lives., Rachel Ewen stumbles on the story of the Pendragon disaster doing research for a cable television series. Peter Selfridge was an engineer on the Pendragon project, and now, in the winter of 1993, is days away from retirement. Then he receives a call from Rachel, wanting information about the Pendragon disaster, in which Peter was nearly killed. He tries too hard to convince her that there is no story, and his efforts have the opposite effect. Rachel discovers that the locomotive in the accident was the prototype for a fleet of futuristic steam locomotives. The more research she does, the more puzzled she becomes about the purpose of the project. Everyone involved seemed to have been aware that the product would never sell. Another puzzle is the cause of the accident. It takes little effort for Rachel to show that the official conclusion can't be correct. She decides that the true cause of the accident had to be murder or sabotage (would like it to be murder or sabotage), but neither stand up to scrutiny. Rachel becomes convinced Selfridge is hiding something. Then an attempt to recreate the Pendragon and it deadly trial run lead to another death and a shattering series of revelations.