Double Jeopardy: Car Warriors 2

by Aaron Allston

Spark Parker and Buffalo Lincoln, trained sleuths and veteran combat drivers, and Detective Pif Heiligmann, need all their skills to unravel a twisted case involving sinister operations at a corporate cloning facility and a knife-wielding child molester. Original.

215 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Aaron Dale Allston was an American game designer and author of many science fiction books, notably Star Wars novels. His works as a game designer include game supplements for role-playing games, several of which served to establish the basis for products and subsequent development of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons game setting Mystara. His later works as a novelist include those of the X-Wing series: Wraith Squadron, Iron Fist, Solo Command, Starfighters of Adumar, and Mercy Kill. He wrote two entries in the New Jedi Order series: Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream and Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand. Allston wrote three of the nine Legacy of the Force novels: Betrayal, Exile, and Fury, and three of the nine Fate of the Jedi novels: Outcast, Backlash, and Conviction.

Reviews

[Love of Hopeless Causes · Rating 1 out of 5]

A Car Wars novel with no vehicular combat by page twenty? I don't need to shake hands with every lawman in West Texas in order to feel cozy. If I set that aside, the opening structure is efficient, but the prose is clunky. The fights are fast, but not readily understood, as in, who is getting hit in what paragraph without back tracking.
 
Why does the cover feature football instead of a Car Wars arena? I don't know if Tor drops the ball editing and production wise, or if this is just an early effort by Allston. Perhaps Steve Jackson would have been better served if they made this in house.
  
Allston probably ends up a good writer, but I prefer to read above my current writing level, and this X-Wing fails to stay on target.

[Erik Erickson]

I read this when I was 14 or so and I fucking loved it. Around the same time I had been playing tons of Quarantine http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaran... and Deathtrak. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d6QFV_2BY6w so car combat was a pretty big deal for me. I remember tearing through the pages in a couple of days. And I can still picture my mental images of the final arena combat. Good shit for a teenage boy with a taste for violent games. And a year later I got my driving permit :D