OUTER PERIMETER

Goddard’s standby hero, roving Oregon State Police Crime Scene Investigator Colin Cellars, returns from his dip into the paranormal in First Evidence (1999), which put him in contact with flying-saucer freaks and shape-shifting silicon-based life forms, to find himself embroiled in what is now “second contact” with extraterrestrials. The alien Allesandra, who seduced Cellars in the earlier novel, also returns, lovely and naked, amid broad authorial hints that she will return again in a future installment about the extraterrestrials and their spaceship. Did the aliens somehow earlier infiltrate the (fictitious) Bancoo tribe of North Americans to set up their own schemes? And how much of this hullabaloo is really only a hallucination on Cellars’s part?

As with The X-Files, Goddard has decided to take extraterrestrials seriously as his game plan for a series. And as with The X-Files, many readers won’t.