Review: The Copper Bracelet by Various Authors

Title: The Copper Bracelet

Authors: (In order of chapter written) Jeffery Deaver, Gayle Lynds, David Hewson, Jim Fusilli, John Gilstrap, Joseph Finder, Lisa Scottoline, David Corbett, Linda Barnes, Jenny Siler, David Liss, P.J. Parrish, Brett Battles, Lee Child, Jon Land, James Phelan

Narrator: Alfred Molina

Publisher: Audible Inc and International Thriller Writers Inc [2009]

Length: 8hrs 38 minutes

Genre: Thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A true edge of your seat thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This book features the same band of war-criminal hunting ‘Volunteers’ who first appeared in The Chopin Manuscript, which, like this one, featured chapters written by different thriller writers. In the opening sequence Harold Middleton, leader of the Volunteers, and key members of his crew are nearly the victims of a hired assassin but, of course, they turn the tables and instead begin to learn that the copper bracelet which the assassin was wearing is far more than a piece of jewellery. The team must track down someone known as The Scorpion and prevent the world exploding into a new world war when a conflict between India and Pakistan is orchestrated by some nefarious types.

If Frederick Forsythe had written a season of 24 it would, I imagine, have turned out a bit like this book. It’s full of global politics, double-crossing assassins and the implausible high-tech gadgetry that a decent thriller must have. But, probably because each one is written by a different author all trying to leave their mark, the chapters each have their own story arc and cliff-hanger endings so it’s even more action packed than an average thriller. There are undoubtedly more twists and turns in the overall plot than would be the case if the story was written by a single author but it holds together well and there are surprisingly few loose ends left over. It’s not a particularly thought-provoking story but it didn’t lose my attention once.

As tends to be the way with thrillers the characters aren’t particularly well-developed, partly because they’re busy leaping out of the way of thermobaric bombs and partly because there are so darned many of them (that’s probably another side-effect of the multiple authorship). However the notion of a group of people tracking down the world’s war criminals is more clearly defined in this book and some of them were quite engaging in their brief appearances.

As he did with the first book Alfred Molina narrates brilliantly, taking the numerous characters of multiple nationalities in his stride. As someone who is a real fan of audio books I am pleased to see this audio only experiment continue. It’s quite clear the authors have fun collaborating as a change from their solo pursuits and I can’t imagine too many listeners wouldn’t experience a similar sense of fun with this classic roller-coaster of a thriller.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As far as I can tell there are no plans for the book to be available in print but a version for the kindle is due in January 2010.

I reviewed The Chopin Manuscript, the first book in this audio-only series, earlier this year

 

Review: Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay

Title: Too Close to Home

Author: Linwood Barclay

Publisher: Orion Books [2009]

ISBN: 978-1-4091-0209-0

Length: 466 pages

Genre: Thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 2.5/5

One-liner: A bit superficial and predictable for me but those who like plot twists and turns should enjoy it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Teenager Derek Cutter has a plan. He’ll hide in his next door neighbour and best friend Adam Langley’s house when Adam and his parents go on holidays. Then Derek will have a venue for hooking up with his girlfriend Penny. Things go awry when the Langley family returns home only an hour after leaving but while Derek is trying to work out how to sneak out without being discovered the entire Langley family is killed by intruders. The next morning Derek’s parents, Jim and Ellen, are shocked to learn of their neighbours’ fate and Derek says nothing about what he saw or heard the previous night. However, Jim Cutter learns some things that make him wonder if the Langley family were killed mistakenly.

I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, Barclay’s No Time for Goodbye earlier this year and what grabbed me most were the thoughtful depictions of a couple’s individual and joint struggles in a time of crisis for their family. In Too Close to Home the characters were not nearly as engaging. Jim Cutter, whose point of view occupies most of the book, is superficial and he didn’t seem to react authentically to much of what was going on in his life. His response to people he didn’t like (punching them) was juvenile and became dull (he did it four times that I can recall) and overall I was bored by him. I never bought Ellen’s character at all but I can’t really say why without giving away spoilers but I think she waited far too long in terms of the internal logic of the story to share her secret with her husband. The only person who I really thought was depicted well was their teenage son Derek but he wasn’t enough of a pivotal role to hold the book together for me.

I also struggled to maintain interest in the plot. It seemed to take forever to get going and, aside from a few minor surprises, was quite predictable. The killer was obvious to me at the moment of their introduction and, even though it had three twists too many, the end of the convoluted plagiarism thread was easy to forecast. There seemed to me to be too many ideas jammed into this one story and so nothing really got explored terribly deeply and the fact that one thread was a very (very) long and obvious red herring didn’t really work.

The book is not terrible. But, as is the way of things, if something grabs my heart in some way I forgive its flaws and when something doesn’t grab me I do admit to becoming overly picky. For tangible and intangible reasons this book just didn’t grab me and so I’ve undoubtedly gotten hot under the collar about things that don’t really matter. However if you haven’t tried Linwood Barclay yet I’d recommend No Time For Goodbye.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I reviewed Linwood Barclay’s No Time for Goodbye in February this year

Other, far more positive, reviews of Too Close to Home can be found at Material Witness (who thinks it’s a better book than No Time for Goodbye), Peeking Between the Pages and A Bookworm’s World

 

Review: Tell No One by Harlan Coben

Title: Tell No One

Author: Harlan Coben

Publisher: Orion Books [originally 2000, this edition 2007]

ISBN: 978-1-4091-1702-5

Length: 346 pages

Genre: Thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A frenetically paced, superbly plotted yarn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Eight years ago David Beck and his wife Elizabeth took their annual trip to the remote place where they had shared their first kiss. That night Beck was beaten and his wife kidnapped. She was found dead several days later, apparently the victim of a serial killer. Beck has since put some semblance of a life back together but it quickly unravels when he starts to receive messages that appear to be from his supposedly dead wife at the same time as two bodies are found in the spot where Elizabeth was kidnapped from. As Beck tries to determine if his wife might be alive after all, the authorities become convinced it was Beck not the serial killer who was responsible for her death and some nefarious characters who seem to know what really happened eight years ago take whatever action is necessary to ensure no one else finds out the truth.

I know it’s an over-used phrase but this book was, for me, a genuine page turner. Sure there are coincidences and plot contrivances to be found but I still read the book as quickly as I physically could, sneaking a few pages whenever I had a spare moment. The original premise hooked me immediately and the story, although far-fetched, sustained its internal logic throughout. There were multiple switches in point of view from first person (Beck’s) to third (virtually everyone else’s at one point or another) which helped give the frantic sense that lots of action was taking place simultaneously.

While the yarn was enjoyable unfortunately the characters were a little too predictable and trite for me to really connect with. Beck is so full of wholesome goodness (he’s a white doctor in a ghetto neighbourhood who never judges anyone not even the pregnant 12-year olds and is still in love with his dead high school sweetheart and is even kind to puppy dogs….) that if I met him in real life I’d want to beat him myself. Almost all of the rest of the characters are stereotypes too: the drug dealer with a heart of gold who helps Beck to go on the run and the evil generic Asian who has seen too much and can kill a man with his bare hands and so on. About the only character who I was really interested in as a person rather than a plot device was Beck’s best friend Shauna the plus size model who “stalks into a room as though it offends her”.

However, in a thriller more than almost any other genre plot is king and I can’t go past the fact that the book kept me interested from the first page to the last.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For some quite unfathomable reason I’ve never read any of Coben’s other books but based on the writing here I’m keen to try more so if you have a favourite Harlan Coben book or can tell me whether or not I need to start at the beginning of his Myron Bolitar series let me know in the comments below.

This book was supplied to me free by the First Reads program at goodreads.com (how a book that’s been available since 2000 qualifies as ‘first read’ has me baffled but I’m grateful for the book anyway).

Tell No One has been reviewed at Jen’s Book Thoughts and You’ve Gotta Read This,

 

Crime Fiction Alphabet: C is for Contest

This week’s entry into the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme concerns Australian author Matthew Reilly’s first novel: Contest which was published in this version in 2000 and I read in 2001. I’m not even sure it qualifies for the genre but I tend to think of crime and thrillers as vaguely on the same spectrum and I do like a jolly good romp every now and again.

Widower and radiologist Steven Swain is relaxing at his Long Island home one afternoon when he is selected by aliens to represent Earth in an intergalactic game which is played every thousand years. The good news is he will have a home turf advantage (the game will take place in the New York City public library) but the bad news is it’s a game played to the death. And Swain’s 11-year-old daughter Holly is along for the ride. Swain is transported to the library and has the game rules speedily explained to him and is introduced to his guide Selexin before being thrust into a contest of wits, cunning and luck.

What I like about Contest is that although it has a far-fetched premise it doesn’t get lost in the ‘other world’ details that can so often happen with this kind of story. Basically it’s a ‘normal guy gets caught up in an abnormal situation’ kind of thriller and you don’t need to learn a new language or be able to faithfully recite a list of names with no consonants to enjoy it. It’s the story of a loving father trying to get himself and his daughter out of a mess not of their making and the cheating aliens and other nasty surprises could just as easily be gangsters with guns or spies with poison darts as in more conventional thrillers. The book rollicks along at a cracking pace and there’s a good deal of humour scattered throughout to add to the enjoyment. There’s not a load of character development or pensive, introspective moments but if you go looking for those in a thriller you’re almost always going to be disappointed.

It’s well known in Australia that this book, Reilly’s first, was rejected by every publisher in the country so he published it himself. This perseverance earned him some publicity and he then scored a publishing deal for his first Shane Schofield (a.k.a. Scarecrow) action adventure Ice Station which became a best seller. There have since been three more novels featuring Scarecrow, a separate series featuring Jack West Jr (the third of these, The Five Greatest Warriors, will be released tomorrow here in Australia) and several standalone novels. All the Reilly books that I’ve read are jam-packed with action and make particularly good audio-books if you like that kind of thing.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve decided to add an extra challenge to my posts in this series by attempting to make all 26 about books I read prior to starting this blog that only have one word titles. So far, so good:

• A is for Absolution (Caro Ramsay)
• B is for Bones (Jan Burke)

 

Review: Panic by Jeff Abbott

Title: Panic

Author: Jeff Abbott

Publisher: ISIS Audio Books [2006]

ISBN: 978-0-7531-2626-4

Length: 11hrs 20mins

Evan Casher is a young documentary film maker whose life is thrown into turmoil when his mother urges him to return to his home town of Austin Texas immediately. When he does, he discovers her body on the kitchen floor of their family home and the killers are still there. Believing Evan has some information they want, the killers torture him then leave him for dead but he is rescued by someone claiming to be one of the good guys. What follows is a wild ride with spies, double agents and lots of unnecessary killing.

This is a perfectly serviceable thriller in which a normal person is thrown into extraordinary circumstances. There’s action a-plenty and a main character who is charming enough that I wanted him to beat the bad guys (however unlikely it should have been). However, I found the plot overly complex but not as engaging as it might have been. There seemed to be a few too many unnecessary twists on top of what was basically a story about a list of names. At no point during the entire book did I care a jot whose name was on the list or what happened to it and when the list was all anyone was talking about it made for some dull spots.

As with all thrillers of this type you have to suspend your disbelief about whether or not an average bloke could suddenly develop the skills to take on a gang of well-trained mercenaries and the CIA in MacGyver-like fashion but I found it more difficult than it should have been to do that here. However I’ll acknowledge that if I’d enjoyed the story more I’d have been less picky about the absurdities of Evan’s success against all the well-trained killers he faced.

To be fair to the author, part of my problem with this particular reading experience had nothing to do with the author. The narrator of the audio version I listened to struggled quite a bit to maintain the separate voices for each character (perhaps due to their large number) and some of the voices were just plain jarring to the ear. In particular the voice of one of the two main bad guys annoyed me intensely and, although there weren’t many of them, the bits of action that involved British characters were plain awful.

To me there was nothing unique about this thriller but it’s the kind of thing lots of people, including the types who commission Hollywood movies these days, really enjoy. There’s loads of action sequences, a decent amount of interesting deaths, a particularly nasty villain, an explosion or two and minimal character development. I’d have preferred a touch more credibility and a few less fight sequences but that’s just me. If you’re going to tackle Panic though I really wouldn’t recommend this audio version.

My rating 3/5

 

Review: Black Out by Gianluca Morozzi

Title: Black Out

Author: Gianluca Morizzi

Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press [original publication 2004, English translation 2008]

ISBN: 978-1-904738-32-9

Length: 251 pages

The premise of the book was intriguing to me. Being a little claustrophobic the idea of just being in an elevator longer than a few minutes sounds like hell, let alone if you add the heat of a southern Italian summer, many hours of being trapped and a crazed killer to the mix. However this was one of those books that was probably better as a pitch than as a wholly realised book. Black Out opens with a passage depicting the hideous torture of a man and if I hadn’t paid hard-earned cash for this one I might not have read further. Lacking context, the scene felt like the literary equivalent of a car chase in an action movie and you either enjoy that kind of thing or you don’t (I’ll let you guess my feelings).

The torture is perpetrated by a man called Aldo Ferro and after meeting him we’re introduced to Claudia a waitress who hates her job and a student named Tomas who has met the love of his life and is planning to run away to Amsterdam with her. All three of these strangers meet by chance in the lobby of an apartment building in Bologna, Italy on the afternoon of a holiday weekend. The elevator they all get into breaks down between the 11th and 12th floors of the building and the ten hours that follow are…well…miserable for all.

I liked one thing about this book: the characters of Claudia and Tomas were credible and quickly established them both as people that I hoped would somehow not fall victim to the evil in their midst.

But there was much not to like. I found it implausible that the kind of angry, perpetually sweaty man as Aldo was depicted would be able to seduce as many complete strangers as he did (both for killing and for casual sex) so I never really ‘bought’ him as a character. Just as well I guess because he’s the most disgusting character I’ve come across in a long time. Almost every line of dialogue he sprouted (either outwardly or in his head) involved some kind of pejorative statement about women and when he wasn’t making repugnant comments he was committing or imagining pointless, excruciatingly described violence.

The book read more like a B-grade screen play than a novel and I’m not surprised to see that it was made into a horror flic. Given the quality of the source material I’m even less surprised to learn the movie went straight to DVD release.  There’s little depth to the story and there’s never much suspense about what will happen in the elevator (you always know it’s going to involve blood and violence). The twist at the end is simply ridiculous and, literally, had me throwing the book at the wall. The writing itself is woeful and I don’t think it’s the translator’s fault. It’s full of clichés (there are only so many ways to describe rape and torture I suppose) and the startlingly large number of similes are off-putting. For example, during the first hour the three are trapped (a mere few pages of book space) they are described as alert as wolves, like wasps in an upturned glass, like worms in a jar and one is sweating like a pig with its throat cut. This took me out of the story as I tried to imagine some kind of hybrid wolf/worm/wasp/pig creature and ponder why a pig with a cut throat would sweat as well as bleed. I’m fairly sure that’s not the reaction the author was going for.

All I got out of this book was several restless nights and the idea that Mr Morozzi doesn’t think much of his country. Or humanity. As far as recommendations go: if people verbally and physically abusing each other is your thing and you have a strong stomach then have at it. Otherwise read anything else.

My rating: 1/5

Other stuff

Other reviewers see the book differently to me so for another perspective try the review by Helen at It’s Criminal

 

Review: The Chopin Manuscript by various authors

Title: The Chopin Manuscript

Author: Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Lisa Scottoline,Joseph Finder, David Hewson, James Grady, S. J. Rozan, Erica Spindler, John Ramsey Miller, David Corbett, John Gilstrap, Jim Fusilli, Peter Spiegelman, Ralph Pezzullo and P. J. Parrish

Publisher: Audible Inc and the International Thriller Writers Association [2007]

ISBN: N/A (Digital Download via audible.com)

Length: 6hours 30minutes (plus an hour of ‘extras’)

Narrator: Alfred Molina

American Harold Middleton is a music professor and former war crimes investigator who is called to Poland to assess whether or not a manuscript purported to be an original, previously undiscovered, Chopin is genuine or a fake. However, the man that Harold meets with is murdered soon after their meeting and it soon becomes clear that there is more to the manuscript than mere rarity.

For what is essentially a publishing gimmick the book is delightfully entertaining. The plot rollicks along with red herrings and shocking twists aplenty, just as a good thriller should. The only evidence that the story is written by 15 different people is that there are perhaps a few more characters than normal, but the upside to that is that there are more genuine surprises than you might expect with a book authored by a sole writer who has pet characters and plot threads. There are several themes which are carried throughout the book, such as the role of music, and these help to produce a surprisingly cohesive story.

None of the characters are particularly well developed, there are too many and the book too short for that, but as this is a book all about a fast paced plot that’s not a huge turnoff on this occasion. There was enough information to glean about Harold, his daughter Charlie, the evil Faust and a few of the other characters to engage my interest and keep me listening.

The book is narrated by actor Alfred Molina who does a superb job of handling the dialogue-rich story which features a couple of dozen characters.

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

The download version of the book that I listened to contained a half-hour interview with Jeffrey Deaver, Lee Child and David Hewson discussing the writing of the book. I found this quite enlightening. Following that are the winning entries in an International Thriller Writers competition which required people to take the first paragraph of The Chopin Manuscript and write a short story. The story by Colin Cotteril was particularly enjoyable and quite a treat to find tucked at the end of the audio file.

I couldn’t find any evidence that the book is available in print format although there is a version available for the kindle.

 

Review: Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva

Title:Prince of Fire (the 5th of 9 Gabriel Allon novels)

Author: Daniel Silva

Publisher: Michael Joseph [2005]

ISBN: 0-7181-4849-5

No. of pages: 366

When the Israeli Embassy in Rome is attacked by suicide bombers the Israeli Secret Service investigate. They discover that this attack is only one in a chain planned against Jewish targets and one of their former agents, Gabriel Allon who now works as an art restorer in Venice, is under threat of assassination as part of the campaign. Allon and his girlfriend, a field agent for the Service, are brought back to Israel where Allon becomes involved in the search for the terrorists.

The thriller is told in several distinct parts that roughly coincide with Allon’s movement from one country to another as he either leaves a place due to the risks he faces or enters a new country to go on the offensive. This starkly demonstrates the compartmentalised nature of his life and adds an intellectual dimension that isn’t present in many thrillers. The heart of the story, the search for one particular terrorist, is skillfully told and the incorporation of real figures into the fiction, such as a meeting between Allon and Yasser Arafat, add to the realistic feel of the story. As always though with this series the thriller element is only part of the content. The other is the provision of a sense, one view among millions, of the conflicts, dreams and sadness that have defined Arab/Israeli relations for decades. Towards the end of the book Allon has a conversation with his friend and mentor about the way Arabs within the borders of the newly partitioned Israel were dealt with in 1948 and it is saddening to realise how little things have changed in the intervening 60 years.

As well as good stories Silva writes some of the best male characters you’ll read in thrillers. Gabriel Allon is a marvellously layered person: artist, assassin, husband, chameleon. He’s always introspective but in this book he questions his own actions and those of the country he loves more than ever and it’s very thought provoking. Ari Shamron, former Director-General of the Service and now adviser and friend to Gabriel is a harsher warrior and provides a different kind of insight as well as much of the historical context regarding activities that take place. The female characters are less well developed although here there are glimpses of some quite intriguing women including one of the terrorists who is as psychologically damaged by her past as Allon is by his.

I have read most of the Gabriel Allon novels but for some reason have read them out of order. I have a quite disjointed view of the story threads that run across more than one book, but for the most part they are self-contained stories and they can be read independently.

Silva is a journalist by training and demonstrates something of a cross-over in skills. His writing is tight and while there is a real depth to his observations about the human condition he never forgets that to tell a story you have to keep people reading right to the end. Prince of Fire does this admirably.

My rating 4/5

 

Review: Pandemic by Daniel Kalla

Title: Pandemic

Author: Daniel Kalla

Publisher: Tor Books [2005]

ISBN: 975-0765-35084-8

No. of Pages: 407

In China’s Gansu Province there’s an outbreak of a deadly virus similar to the Spanish Flu that killed 20 million people in 1919. Dr Noah Haldane and a team of experts from the World Health Organisation (WHO) are called in to help the authorities identify and contain the virus. Just as things seem to be under control there are further outbreaks in Hong Kong and London. On top of having to address the medical issues the authorities are worried that the disease may not be spreading naturally.

This is a fairly standard thriller with a  serviceable but not terribly unique plot. Virulent disease outbreaks, the threat of terrorism, doctors running around saving the world in the nick of time have all been done before. But more familiar than that is the roles and attributes assigned to various groups and people. The main characters are all good-looking, the Chinese are horribly authoritarian, the bad guys are all fundamentalist Muslims and the Americans are all heroes. The cliché ratio was just a bit too high for me. That aside, the book moves along at a good pace and there’s lots of action scattered across the globe. The ending is a little predictable but there’s only so many places a thriller can go so that’s far more forgivable than the cliché count.

Kalla’s made a valiant attempt to make the characters more than two-dimensional but, at least as far as the main characters are concerned, hasn’t really succeeded. As well as being a hard-working, brilliant, emerging pathogens expert Noah Haldine is a loving father going through some marital troubles but the threads dealing with his personal life all felt a bit forced to me. The other main character is the American ‘bug czar’: the female head of Counter-Bioterrorism who’s also a brilliant, sexy, workaholic going through a marriage breakdown. You don’t need me to actually write the phrase ’sexual tension’ do you? Kalla’s done a much better job with the minor characters such Noah’s fellow WHO doctor and the Egyptian policeman who plays a pivotal role in uncovering the terrorists’ activity. For me they were far more engaging and interesting although their appearances were too brief.

This is Kalla’s first novel and he’s written four more since then. Because I’ve been struggling to feed my medical thriller habit since I gave up on the rubbish Robin Cook writes these days and because there are some elements here that show potential I’m prepared to give him another go. But only if I can mooch something.

My rating 2.5/5

Other stuff

On a slightly off-topic note I’m going to rant about the author’s website. I’ve ranted about the issue of bad author websites before but, seriously, I don’t think it gets much worse than this. Why bother? There’s a nice photo of the author in his scrubs (in case you missed the fact he’s a doctor) and a whole load of over the top pull quotes from reviews and some extremely dull video. There’s not even a synopsis of any of his books (presumably you have to click on one of the dozens of links to online stores for that but I metaphorically stomped off and didn’t click anything).

 

Review: Freezing Point by Karen Dionne

Title: Freezing Point

Author: Karen Dionne

Publisher: Jove Books [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-515-14536-6

The world’s supply of fresh water is decreasing right at the point need for the commodity is increasing exponentially so it seems only natural that some corporation headed by someone evil will try to melt any icebergs created at the planet’s poles and sell the resulting water to the highest bidder. Equally naturally are environmentalists who are opposed to this idea and will take violent actions to make their point. Throw in an unknown virus, a new breed of animal and a few severe storms and you have the basic building blocks of Freezing Point. 

The elements of a story I would like are present here: a remote location, environmental activists, sinister corporations, vaguely plausible science, and, at least potentially, a strong female character. However it’s not enough for a book to tick all the boxes, it still has to have an engaging story that links all the elements together and engrosses you so heavily that you forget you’ve read a load of books in the genre. This one didn’t achieve that for me. The story, such as it was, was entirely predictable from the outset, contained a load of half-finished threads that were plain annoying and had science and environmental messages so clunkily inserted into the narrative that the thing consistently felt more like a text book or a lefty diatribe than the thriller it was purported to be. I abhor being preached at in my fiction.

Also, while thrillers are allowed (even supposed) to have a series of unlikely events occurring simultaneously to create the perfect storm (literal or metaphorical) I need some realism in the mix. So many people in this story took such unrealistic actions that I rarely got past the ‘that just wouldn’t happen even in fiction-land’ mindset. 

The book had a lot of characters introduced in quick succession and many were never heard from again so keeping track of who they all were and where they fit into the big picture required more effort than it should have done. None of them were fleshed out well enough to be truly engaging. Zo, the female character I should have liked, viewed every comment or action taken by male characters as misogynistic which grew tiresome. The other people were all a bit too black or white (all good or all evil) for me to really buy them and I’ve no clue why Rebecca (the avenging environmentalist) was even in the book as she really took no active part in the plot. Again, as with the story, there were lots of unexplained character developments dumped in the mix for no apparent reason such as several people despising each other with passion but without explanation (except in one instance). 

There are a few interesting action-based passages here but, overall, the interesting concept that must have been the idea behind this book was lost in the delivery. The cover of my copy pronounces Dionne to be the next Michael Crichton but the very big difference between the two is that Crichton entertains first and allows his mastery of the storytelling art to relay any messages almost subliminally whereas Dionne, at least in this book which is her first, seems to assume readers will put up with second-rate storytelling if the messages are worthy enough. I’m harder to please than that.

My rating 2/5