The Astronaut's Son: A Novel

*Foreword Reviews 2018 INDIES Book of the Year Award Winner**2019 Connecticut Book of the Year Awards - Finalist*"Seigel's solid debut provides an intriguing and plausible variant on moon landing conspiracy theories. . . . Equally strong on plotting and characterization, Seigel does better than many other thriller writers in making his lead's pain and uncertainty about the past palpable." --Publishers Weekly The Astronaut's Son will "keep you on the edge of your seat all the way through . . . The best part of this book are the characters . . . The dialogue and description are good too." --Mensa BulletinOn the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing comes a novel in which a Jewish astronaut must reassess his moral compass when forced to confront NASA's early collaboration with Nazis and the role it may have played in his father's death.
Jonathan Stein thinks only a bad heart can stop him from reaching the moon. But when he discovers his father may have been murdered to protect an appalling NASA secret, he must decide whether his moral compass still points towards the stars. Days before the Apollo 18 launch in 1974, Jonathan's father, an Israeli astronaut at NASA, died of an apparent heart attack. A year before his own launch, in 2005, Jonathan, a typically devout skeptic, becomes captivated by the tale of a mysterious online conspiracy theorist who claims that his father had been killed. Unable to keep long-buried suspicions from resurfacing, he reopens the case, digging into a past that becomes stranger and more compelling the deeper he goes.
To get to the truth he must confront Dale Lunden, his father's best friend and the last man on the moon, and his elusive childhood hero Neil Armstrong. When his relentless pursuit of the truth leads to disturbing revelations about the Nazis who worked for NASA, the hardest questions to answer are the ones he must ask himself.
The Astronaut's Son was inspired by the true story of Nazi scientists and engineers at NASA.