The crew of the Solar Queen have survived their adventures in the Myklos system and have a clue to a mass of minerals that would make their fortune, and with two ships, the former apprentices on the Queen have been given command of the mining mission but they find themselves faced with planetary electromagnetic storms and the crew of their new ship.

This is the last of the Solar Queen stories and they bow out on a fairly strong note ( )

I loved the original Solar Queen stories, but this is a late continuation officially by Norton in collaboration by Norton and a younger writer, Sherwood Smith. From what Marion Zimmer Bradley said of a similar collaboration, I suspect the younger writer did all or most of the writing. This is the second nvel; in the continuation an involves Dane Thorston, who joined the Solar Queen in the last novel, with the ship North Star. they go to a mining planet where former North Star crew members are being killed by a strange electro-magnetic force. ( )

A decent continuation to the Solar Queen series. I don't think I've read Derelict for Trade (the immediate predecessor to this one), which left me groping a bit - but not much, the setup from the previous book was pretty clear. The interesting thing in this one was the way the viewpoint moved around - as I recall, Norton's Solar Queen novels were entirely (or at least mostly) from Dane's POV, while this one was from Dane, Ali, Rip...lots of people. All from Solar Queen people though - we never saw the crew from the outside. The puzzle is interesting, the solution is fascinating...though the deus ex machina to deal with the tool used to reach the solution seemed a bit much. I'd have been more interested if they'd just learned how to deal with it - shut it off unless needed. Or perhaps some trauma removed it (which it did, kind of). But "Problem over, OK, don't need that any more, let it fade"...that was just a little too much authorial meddling. Still, interesting story, good writing, characters true to (what I remember of) the original characterization - I'm looking for the next (and the previous!) one in this series. ( )