WELCOME TO THE DEADLY SKIES Pam Am Flight 10 is heading routinely from Seattle to Tokyo when one by one its engines explode. Only brilliant work by its pilot saves the 747 and the hundreds of passengers on board.... At Pan Am headquarters, the newly revived airline is facing a serious setback--rumors of financial uncertainty have panicked Wall Street and sent stock prices and bond ratings plummeting.... At the airline's maintenance facility, a mysterious intruder has left behind evidence of possible industrial sabotage.... Since the new Pan Am has risen from the ashes of deregulation to challenge the big three U.S. airlines, nothing has gone smoothly. Now with threats from all sides, Pan Am's chief pilot Brian Murphy, its new chief financial officer Elizabeth Sterling, and international financier Creighton MacRae must work together to save the beleaguered airline--if their personal feelings don't get in the way.... "The Airport of the 1990s...A superb novel." --Library Journal From the Paperback edition. Phoenix Rising reads like a cross between a black box transcript and Business Week . The dual dangers to a new airline involve financial skulduggery and terrorism. New chief financial officer Elizabeth Sterling must cope with both as she discovers just how much trouble her new company is in. As events jump from bombs in Washington state to London banks to the arctic wilds of Canada, Elizabeth must race to meet them. Not only is her airline in danger of hostile takeover, but her daughter's very life is at stake. The gripping story of her ripostes to these threats makes an absorbing book. Dennis Winters Combining elements of the financial and the aviation thriller, Nance (Scorpion Strike, 1992) puts together a would-be page-turner marred by cardboard-thin, uninvolving characters and a not entirely credible conspiracy. Elizabeth Sterling, a brilliant and beautiful investment banker, takes on the task of salvaging an economically troubled start-up airline, only to find herself confronting a mystifying campaign of sabotage. The company's finances are in complete disarray, its computer systems are compromised, and two attempts at downing flights would have been mass tragedies if not for the heroic efforts of the crafts' pilots. Jetting from Seattle to New York to London and Hong Kong, Sterling struggles to simultaneously restructure the airline's finances and restore Wall Street's confidence in the firm. Stymied at every turn, she untangles a dangerous web of escalating intrigue that threatens to drive the airline out of business before it can succeed. Enlisting the aid of her lover, Brian Murphy (the airline's chief pilot), and retired Scottish businessman Creighton MacRae, she discovers a plot by an international financial group to control the US commercial aviation market. MacRae uses his resources to help Sterling find alternative financing while he worms his way to the root of the problem. Murphy struggles to find the saboteur responsible for the two near-crashes and to uncover the mole inside the company he believes is providing access and information to the airline's enemies. Together, they pull off a 12th-hour rescue and save the firm. Phoenix Rising takes much too long to lift off--the conspiracy is too slowly unveiled, the villains make their appearance very late in the story--but once it gets airborne, it develops some momentum. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. HE DEADLY SKIES Pam Am Flight 10 is heading routinely from Seattle to Tokyo when one by one its engines explode. Only brilliant work by its pilot saves the 747 and the hundreds of passengers on board.... At Pan Am headquarters, the newly revived airline is facing a serious setback--rumors of financial uncertainty have panicked Wall Street and sent stock prices and bond ratings plummeting.... At the airline's maintenance facility, a mysterious intruder has left behind evidence of possible industrial sabotage.... Since the new Pan Am has risen from the ashes of deregulation to challenge the big three U.S. airlines, nothing has gone smoothly. Now with threats from all sides, Pan Am's chief pilot Brian Murphy, its new chief financial officer Elizabeth Sterling, and international financier Creighton MacRae must work together to save the beleaguered airline--if their personal feelings don't get in the way.... "The Airport of the 1990s...A superb novel." --Librar