From Publishers WeeklyHugo-winner Bova's fourth Asteroid Wars novel (after 2004'sThe Silent War) is a bewildering attempt to exploit loose ends. When crazed assassin Dorik Harbin disables the spaceshipSyracuse, an ore-carrier run by Victor Zacharias, Victor is forced to jettison an escape pod containing his wife and children. Unfortunately, the Zacharias family's desperate efforts to survive are lost among a host of other stories. While son Theo and daughter Angela battle incredible odds to make their way back to inhabited space, Victor steals another spaceship,Pleiades, and goes looking for his family andSyracuse. Various other characters, including Harbin, who becomes a repentant priest named Dorn, go on quests in other spaceships. Chapters are named for the spacecraft in which they take place, which helps orient readers, but Bova doesn't focus enough on the technical features of these ships or the natures of those in them to bring either to life. The action remains equally muddled.(Aug.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.From BooklistVictor Zacharius and his only ally, a power-and-otherwise-hungry female tycoon, are looking for his family, refugees from Chrysalis. A sculptor and a cyborg who once commanded the attack on Chrysalis are searching for an alien artifact tycoon Martin Humphries owns. Meanwhile, Humphries tries to hold on to the artifact and its secrets. His assessment of the thing as likely to revolutionize human society proves correct, but only after a struggle fraught with plots, murders, and battles galore, plus stronger characterizations than are normal for Bova. The fourth Asteroid Wars novel may please more readers than the hard-science, space-advocacy crowd Bova usually attracts. Green, Roland