THE APOLLO DECEPTION

Everything you knew about the moon landing whose 50th anniversary we just celebrated is wrong. No, wait, there’s more.

Yes, American technology in 1969 was indeed the envy of the world. But what it was used for, Silver (The Bookworm, 2018, etc.) cheekily reveals, was not to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon but to produce a video simulation of the landing nobody could tell from the real thing. Now the announcement that the Chinese are about to launch a manned lunar mission of their own has NASA panicking. When the Chinese astronauts land and find no American flag in the Sea of Tranquility, they’ll realize the whole mission was a fraud—and they’ll be free to tell the whole world and, incidentally, to claim the moon for their own country. Gary Stephens, a director of TV commercials whose father, Charlie, was recently murdered by members of a dark conspiracy, is alerted to his father’s participation in the "week-long reality TV show" that was Apollo 11 by NASA widow Chris Walsh, whose daughter, Robin, is one of the astronauts who’s been hand-picked for the Dark Side mission—a covert last-minute moonshot whose goal is to plant a suitably weathered American flag in the alleged landing spot before the Chinese can get there. Readers whose eyes haven’t glazed over at this outrageous premise, and even some whose eyes have, will be impressed by Silver’s finesse in juggling endless time frames and counterplots and rewarded with an elaborate set of assassinations and double-crosses by the Chinese, the Russians, the Americans, and some enterprising freelancers that threaten to compromise the top-secret mission and continue after liftoff and even once the intrepid crew lands on the lunar surface.

This fast-moving pipe dream could be the perfect airplane read, because you just never know.