#79 Sky Sabotage (37th Anniversary Review)

[tomswift2002]

Published: 1983
Author: Unknown (possible Neal Barret --- unconfirmed as of July 2020)
Part 1 of 2 (Sky Sabotage - The Skyfire Puzzle)

Plot: After Joe overhears a crooked transaction take place in the parking lot of Bayport High, Frank and Joe head off to Florida to stop a satellite company from being involved in industrial espionage against a rival satellite company that is about to send a new satellite into orbit. 

Review:  So in Chapter 1, Joe overhears two guys exchanging money in the parking lot of Bayport High, while he's waiting to pick up Chet Morton.  Joe manages to get the license plate numbers for the two cars that the guys drive away in, and picks up Chet, he stops at home to let Fenton Hardy and Frank know about the exchange and the license numbers.  Fenton calls the State Police and finds out that the cars belong to a well known criminal and the other belongs to the head of a satellite company that is trying to launch a satellite into orbit before a rival competitor.  Fenton has the boys drive out to the house of the known criminal to check up on him.  At the criminal's home, the boys witness a UFO flying in the sky.

[MacGyver]

This is one of those Hardy Boys books I know I've read but it was so long ago I don't really recall much of anything with this book.
   I didn't realize that The Skyfire Puzzle serves as a follow up to this book though. That's neat. Do you know if #85 specifically references #79?

[tomswift2002]

The Skyfire Puzzle contains characters and locations from Sky Sabotage and highly references Sabotage. 

[MacGyver]

Okay- I'll have to go and look through it again. Thanks.

[tomswift2002]

So I finished the book a few days ago.  It was just as great as I remembered it.  Of course there were a few parts where, had it been written in 2020, people would've been using cell phones and laptop computers.  Part of the mystery involved computers, and how the crooks did the computer sabotage, by 2020 it was a very roundabout way, but by 1983 standards its the only way they could do it. 

It's kind of interesting, but over the last 4 or 5 books I've noticed that the authors are not afraid to drop the name brands of vehicles into the stories anymore.  In the early Hardy Boys from the 1920's and 30's you had the occasional name drop, like in the 1928 version of The Shore Road Mystery you had name drops like the Pierce-Arrow, Ford and other 1920's automobile manufacturers.  But then from the 40's through to 1980, car manufacturer names seemed to be a no-no, whether it was because of trademark, or maybe the Syndicate was afraid of being dated by naming a certain car, so they just went with generic descriptions like "a blue pick-up truck".  But in Sky Sabotage you had Frank and Joe driving around in a blue Ford pickup, and riding a Honda motorcycle. 

And the UFO the Hardy's saw---it was a weather balloon that one of the bad guys was using to test a heat-seeking missile on.  The test was to see if the missile would hit a rocket carrying a satelllite, and destroy it. 

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

[tomswift2002]

Another interesting thing with this book is that in the UK, it is #77 in the Armada line, however, for some reason Angus & Robertson did not release this book.  So the Wanderer hardcover is scarce, since for people who are trying to have all the hardcovers in their collection, either in the US or UK, the Wanderer version is the only one available.

[MacGyver]

The Armada numbering is quite different from the US standard numbering. It was quite weird as a kid to grow up with the Armada numbering before ever learning the American numbering.