A United States Air Force jet fighter on a test flight vanishes from the California skies . . . and reappears four months later near Guam. Two years later, a Russian cargo plane experiences a similar disappearance, with its crew completely unaware that ten months have passed for them. As the American and Soviet governments investigate the parallel cases, a jumbo jet returning tourists to New York from Paris also disappears over the Atlantic Ocean, only to reappear over the continental United States weeks later. Though initially the people involved seem little affected by their disappearance, over time they begin to experience unusual cravings, then suddenly develop cysts and lapse into comas which signal the arrival of a new type of alien invader . . .

Best known for his “Colossus” trilogy, Dennis Feltham Jones was a former British naval officer who authored over a half-dozen science fiction novels during a fifteen-year period. This, his penultimate work, exhibits all of his strengths and weaknesses as a writer within the genre. The concept at the heart of his novel, the emergence of invasive species, is eerily prescient to readers living in a world increasingly concerned with the consequences of exotic flora and fauna appearing in different habitats. Yet most of the characters remain stuck in two dimensions throughout the novel, often displaying a curious lassitude that negates much of the tension Jones tries to build. Most disappointing of all, though, is Jones’s clumsy injection of religion into the book. What might have provided a refreshing take on the alien-invasion novel instead seems little more than a Cold-War era commentary on the emptiness of Soviet ideology. This cheapens rather than enriches his work, which is enjoyable enough but lacks the power that Jones seems to have wanted his work to have. ( )