Last Flight of the Arrow

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

One should not rely on promotional blurbs on paperback covers, but when
these describe a “nerve-shattering technothriller” of “nonstop
tension,” a reader rightly expects some relevant excitement in the
first 50 or so pages. Alas, in this first novel by an Ontario writer of
nonfiction works on military aviation, there is none. As characters were
being introduced with brief life histories, this reader amused himself
by underlining clichés. After a time, that, too, became boring.
Finally, on page 74, following a scene of dumbfounding implausibility
between the U.S. President and a Soviet ambassador, Ike asks Dief not to
scrap the Avro Arrow, but merely to pretend to scrap it. There follows a
mediocre tale of hidden Arctic airstrips and a mission flown by an
intrepid Polish-Canadian (modelled on Jan Zurakowski, who was A.V.
Roe’s chief test pilot on the Arrow, in fact) to photograph a secret
Soviet base. Will he make it? Will he be able to land without fuel on a
pitching U.S. carrier? Does it really matter, when there isn’t an
interesting character in the book and the story is too weak to make its
events even momentarily diverting?