The Apollo Deception

December 1, 2019
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.

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February 17, 2020
This intriguing thriller from Silver (The Bookworm) takes the premise that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing never happened. Instead, it was a fake perpetrated with the help of, among others, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, Walt Disney, and Charlie Stephens, the filmmaker father of the book’s protagonist, Gary Stephens. When, in 2019, the Chinese government announces plans to plant its flag on the moon alongside the American one, chaos breaks out among the surviving conspirators: how could they explain the fact that there’s no flag on the moon? Eighty-one-year-old Charlie is murdered hours after the announcement, and Gary, a director of TV commercials, and his sister, Pippa, inherit their father’s worldly goods, which include seven large 35mm film cans hidden in a locker at Manhattan’s 79th Street Boat Basin. Without further ado, Gary is pulled into a world of spies and counterspies, murky politicians, greedy businessmen, and trained assassins. Silver keeps up a breakneck pace, dexterously swerving from one potential calamity to the next just as the logic begins to wobble. Fans of alternate history and conspiracy theories will have fun. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group.