David Starr, a promising young member of Earth’s Council of Science, is recruited to investigate a series of fatal poisonings that are all traced back to food imported from the Martian colonies.

Once on Mars, Starr adopts the alias of Dick Williams and, along with a short, unruly farmhand named Bigman, ends up working on the Makian farm, the largest on the planet. After several altercations with two of Makian’s irascible foremen, Starr ends up working for the farm’s resident agronomist, Benson. The benevolent researcher has been frustrated in his attempts to locate the source of the poison, but theorizes that perhaps there could be Martians living in caverns beneath the planet’s surface.

Starr enlists Bigman’s help to explore the caverns and indeed encounters a highly evolved race of beings of pure energy who bestow upon Starr a device that generates a personal force field that also shrouds his external appearance. One of the energy beings designates Starr as a “Space Ranger,” an identity that Starr adopts as he tracks down the true perpetrators of the food poisoning.

David Starr, Space Ranger is the first of six books known as the Lucky Starr series written by Isaac Asimov under the pen name of Paul French. The first volume is a fun, lighthearted adventure with no slow moments. I look forward to reading the next!