Showing posts with label science thriller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science thriller. Show all posts

Monday, April 30, 2018

The Demon Crown

The Demon Crown is James Rollins' 19th solo novel. While it is a Sigma Force novel, it is a bit unusual because the threat they are fighting against is a prehistoric wasp.

At the conclusion of book 8 in the series, Bloodline, the Sigma Force crew had eradicated Japan's Kage, also known as the Guild, a terrorist group.  However, at least 2 of them survived.  One of them, Seichan, is now working with the Americans and Takashi Ito, has formed a smaller, tougher group whose intent is to replicate a Pearl Harbor attack on Hawaii.  Takashi hopes it will bring an Imperial Japan back to power.

A secondary plot concerns James Smithson, the creator of the Smithsonian Museum.  Upon his death in 1829 in Italy, he was buried with a chest.  He left papers that mentioned a secret artifact that could leash hell upon the earth.  He called it the demon crown and ordered that it be buried with him.  When Smithson's grave was about to be uprooted by a quarry in 1903 Alexander Graham Bell, a Smithsonian Regent, immediately took a group to Italy and brought back Smithson's bones and the chest which contained a vial filled with amber and bones.

Over the early years of U. S. history the Librarian of Congress personally ensured the security of Smithson's personal papers and the chest but in 1944 a robbery took place and they were stolen by Japanese agents.  A few Sigma Force members later wondered whether this robbery was the reason for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima for no one knew if the vial held a weapon.

On May 6 in the present day a swarm of wasps entered the city of Hana on the island of Maui and killed 54 people with their venom but injured a thousand more.  Commander Grayson Pierce and girlfriend Seichan are vacationing in Hawaii when the swarm arrives and instantly react to the event.  The Sigma Force deployment begins.

I was enthralled with the book until the halfway point when I realized how far-fetched the plot was.  It was still thrilling but it was bizarre.  Author James Rollins is a veterinarian by trade and his scientific and historical facts have always been accurate in the past  so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and continued reading.

He added a special touch with the addition of chapters written from the wasps' point of view.  We now know how they think and why they act a certain way.  As a woman I was amused that after the mating ritual the female wasp eats the male wasp.  I thought this addition was quite creative, especially coming from a male author.

The thriller formula was followed exactly.  It began with a killer hunting down a victim, high stakes were maintained for the main character, the action kept moving as complications were heaped on the Sigma Force crew, the clock was ticking toward a deadline that suddenly was shortened and ended with the world restored but the world is a different place.  I like when an author who writes a novel consistently every year does not get bored and change the formula. Many authors have fallen to boredom and written a few poor novels but Rollins has been consistent with the thriller formula.

This may be James Rollins' best book to date.  It certainly was his most creative.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Beyond the Ice Limit

Beyond the Ice Limit is Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's 4th Gideon Crew novel and it is a sequel their 2000 book The Ice Limit. It is a stand alone novel so readers do not have to read the first book to understand the plot.

Five years before the events taking place in the book engineer Eli Glinn led a team to southern Chile to retrieve a meteorite.  A combination of a storm, an attack from a rogue ship captain and the strange behavior of the meteorite itself caused the ship to sink, killing most of the people on board.  A working hypothesis was made that the meteorite was a spore for an alien life form.

In the present year, Eli Glinn recruits Gideon Crew to build and detonate a nuclear weapon under the sea in order to kill the alien life form that he is worried might be growing where the meteorite was dropped into the sea. A crew is assembled and board a ship bound for Chile.  Undersea recovery efforts were able to obtain the sunken ship's black boxes and a video of the ship's last moments revealed that as the meteor hit the salty sea water it transformed into a different being.  Further tests showed that while the alien life form was under the sea it also extended 2 miles under the sea bed.  This gave it the potential to threaten the life of the entire planet earth if it wasn't destroyed.

Portions of the story seemed like science fiction with the alien controlling worms that infected the brains of most of the workers on the ship. With the advance of the worms there was a rush to detonate the bomb even though it was not large enough to reach beneath the seabed.

However, this was definitely a thriller.  I was hooked from the first page and could not stop reading until I had finished the book in one sitting.  Each chapter ended with enough suspense to keep me reading.  The scientific rhetoric was minimal so that a layperson such as myself could easily read through the book.

I now feel the need to read The Ice Limit even though I already know how it will end. I am curious about any details of the earlier story that I may have missed.

Highly recommended.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

The Seventh Plague

I am a fan of James Rollins' Sigma Force novels.  The Seventh Plague is his 18th novel in the series and his 23rd novel to date.  The inside front cover blurb summarizes the novel as follows:

"Two years after vanishing into the Sudanese desert, the leader of a British archeological expedition, Professor Harold McCabe, comes stumbling out of the sands, frantic and delirious, but he dies before he can tell his story.  The mystery deepens when an autopsy uncovers a bizarre corruption: someone has begun to mummify the professor's body-while he was still alive.

His strange remains are returned to London for further study, when alarming news arrives from Egypt.  The medical team that had performed the man's autopsy has fallen ill with an unknown disease, one that is quickly spreading throughout Cairo.  Fearing the worst, a colleague of the professor reaches out to a longtime friend: Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma Force.  The call is urgent, for Professor McCabe had vanished into the desert while searching for proof of the ten plagues of Moses.  As the pandemic grows, a disturbing question arises:  Are those plagues starting again?

Before Director Crowe can investigate, a mysterious group of assassins leaves behind a fiery wake of destruction and death, erasing all evidence.  With the professor's body incinerated, his home firebombed, Sigma Force must turn to the archeologist's only daughter, Jane McCabe, for help.  While sifting through what's left of her father's work, she discovers a puzzling connection tying the current threat to a shocking historical mystery, one involving the travels of Mark Twain, the genius of Nikola Tesla, and the adventures of famous explorer Henry Morgan Stanley.

To unravel a secret going back millennia, Director Crowe and Commander Grayson Pierce will be thrust to opposite sides of the globe.  One will search for the truth, traveling to the plague ridden streets of Cairo to a vast ancient tomb buried under the burning sands of the Sudan; the other will struggle to stop a mad genius locked within a remote Arctic engineering complex, risking the lives of all those he holds dear.

As the global crisis grows even larger, Sigma Force will confront a threat born of the ancient past and made real by the latest science-a danger that will unleash cascading series of plagues, culminating in a scourge that could kill all of the world's children. . . decimating humankind forever."

I expected alot from this story but was disappointed.  I found myself skipping pages because I was only interested in the part about the ancient past.  This was not a thriller for me at all.  First of all, this is not your typical Sigma Force novel.  Some of the series' dominant characters had small roles and the storyline was not a usual Sigma Force plot.  Second, the subplot involving the assassins did not fit well with the rest of the story and neither did the subplot about the genius in the Arctic. I think the author should have stuck with the main plot and run with it.

Very disappointed as James Rollins is one of my favorite authors.