Publisher's Weekly
Summer 1990 in the Persian Gulf: A small band of unidentified Arabs hijacks Prometheus II , flagship supertanker of the Heritage Mariner oiler fleet. Sir William Heritage flies from London to Bahrain and is immediately kidnapped. His daughter Robin and son-in-law Richard Mariner are on the Indian Ocean aboard the experimental multihull ship Kat a pult when they and Katapult' s two inventors, an Australian and an American, come upon an abandoned, smoking tanker that has been attacked by aircraft. Although the object of many frights and speculations, the fire ship never figures in the story, which follows this small group, eventually expanding to include three more Americans and an Arab, as they wrest Prometheus from the terrorists. But after finding the tanker without the hostages or villains, the rescuers continue on, in a bloody finale, to rescue the crew members, who are held on an abandoned oil rig at the mouth of the Gulf. The book teems with cheap cliff-hangers (the ``hand that grasped at his leg'' belongs to a corpse that ``had tangled its rigid fingers in Richard's clothing''), amazing coincidences (the villain is Richard's godson, who is paid by the father of the villain's unknowing top aide, who is twin to Prometheus 's medic) and an incredible absence of references to Iraq in August 1990. Nevertheless, Tonkin's ( The Coffin Ship ) latest has explosive movie potential and is likely to sell very well.

Library Journal
Tonkin's new novel is a sequel to his thriller The Coffin Ship (Crown, 1990). Set eight years later, its characters Richard Mariner and Robin Heritage are again caught up in a mystery centered around oil supertankers in the Persian Gulf. This time they discover a ``fire ship,'' a vessel loaded with explosives and designed to destroy the ships around it. At the same time, their supertanker Prometheus II is boarded and held by terrorists, and Robin's father is kidnapped when he arrives in the Gulf to manage the situation. Tonkin's vivid descriptions of the maritime industry and the sea, as well as the swift pace of the action make this a gripping novel. The main characters are James Bondian in their ability to overcome all obstacles and avoid all bullets, but this has never been a drawback to a good thriller. Recommended for general readers.-- Kathy Armendt Sorci, IIT Research Inst., Annapolis, Md.