Enigma - Catherine Coulter

   2017; 482 pages.  Book 21 (out of 24) in the “FBI Thriller” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Crime Thriller.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    It’s been a bad day for Agent Dillon Savich, the chief of the FBI’s CAU (Criminal Apprehension Unit).  A friend of his, Dr. Janice Hudson, called to alert him to a hostage situation at her neighbor’s house, where some guy had broken into the house, taped the nine-months-pregnant woman to a chair, and was screaming incoherently at police officers outside.

 

    Long story short, Savich entered the house from a back way, shot the perpetrator - which put him in a coma - and saved the day.  Sounds like a glorious day, huh?

 

    Alas, the head of the police squad is now royally pissed off at Savich for stealing the limelight from the police, who had jurisdiction in the situation, and felt they had everything under control.  It’s never good to show up the cops, even if you’re from the FBI.

 

    Oh well.  At least things can’t get any worse today, can they?

 

    Hmm.  How about if a maximum security killer escapes from a prison van as he’s being transferred to a federal penitentiary under heavy guard.  Does that qualify as “the day getting worse?”

 

What’s To Like...

   My wife reads a lot of Catherine Coulter books, so I’ve heard of her for quite a while.  I always presumed she was strictly a romance writer, so it was delight to discover that she also writes an straight up "FBI Thriller” series, of which Enigma is Book 21 out of 24.

 

    There are two main storylines: 1.) Why did the gunman take a pregnant woman hostage, and why does he call himself an “Enigma”?  2.) Who went to a lot of trouble to spring the convicted felon Manta Ray from the prison van, why?, and is the FBI going to catch him again?

 

    The story is fast-paced with a nice mixture of equal parts action, intrigue, and personal interactions among the members of Savich's FBI team.  By switching back and forth between the two stories, Catherine Coulter avoids any slow spots.  There are 61 chapters, plus a Prologue and three (count ‘em, three!) Epilogues covering 482 pages; that averages out to just under eight pages per chapter.  The entire tale takes place in the greater Washington DC area.

 

    You’ll learn a smidgen of Russian to use on your sweetheart: “moy golub” means “my dove”.  I also learned that “flashbang” is slang for a stun grenade.  I liked the obscure (for me) music references: Twenty One Pilots, whom I have heard of, and James Bay, who was new to me.  I chuckled at the brief reference to the use of apricot pits for medicinal purposes.  I was once hired to document a synthesis for the active ingredient, amygdalin (I am a chemist by trade), but it turned out to be a setup when the client abruptly changed his mind and wanted me to make amphetamines instead.  That was the end of that little business venture.

 

    The ending is not so much a “thrills and spills” affair, as a matter of solving the two plotlines mentioned above.  There are some nice twists along the way in both of them , and this is the first time I’ve read a book where there are three Epilogues.  Be sure to read all three; the last one is a stunner.

 

Excerpts...

    “I’m told you’re an expert at survival and all, but my boss, Agent Dillon Savich, didn’t say whether you leap tall buildings.”

    He laughed.  “Hey, Wittier, I’m proud of you.  It’s hard to crack jokes when you’re terrified.  You doing better?”

    “No, but I’m sucking it up, and insulting you helps.”

    “You’ll be fine once your brain accepts you’re in expert hands, namely mine.  Yes, give me a bottle of water and the sun, and I can find an anthill.  Leap tall buildings?  Three stories is my personal best.”  (loc. 467)

 

    “The cogeners we tested proved too toxic, particularly to the nervous system and bone marrow.  We stopped then because there’s only so far a pharmaceutical company can venture into basic research like that.  We survive by developing drugs we can sell, and being old isn’t a reimbursable medical condition.  None of the insurance companies are set to pay for any such drug, and so extended work in an area like anti-aging isn’t in our financial interest.”  (loc. 3598)

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, Enigma is selling for $8.99 at Amazon.  The rest of the 24-book series varies in price from $7.99 to $24.99, except for Book 2, The Maze, which is currently discounted to the generous price of $1.99.  Catherine Coulter has another 60+ books (assuming Wikipedia’s list is comprehensive), most of which fall into all sorts of Romance categories.

 

“Whenever science makes a discovery, the Devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.” (Alan Valentine, Epigraph )

    There’s really nothing to grouse about in Enigma.  I kept waiting for the two storylines to merge, but, and this is not a spoiler, they never did.  I’ve now gathered that this is the norm for Catherine Coulter’s FBI Thriller series: we follow the actions of Dillon Savich’s team of agents, and usually they are working on more than one case per book.  So the reader ends up getting two crime-thriller tales in one book.  That's kinda neat.

 

    Other than that, all I can say is that I figured out the “Enigma” mystery a lot quicker than Savich and company did.

 

    I found Enigma to be a delightful introduction to Catherine Coulter and this series.  No, I won’t be reading any of her Romance books; I leave those up to my wife, who loves them.  In closing I should mention that I only noticed six instances of cussing in the entire book.  It says something about a writer, when she can pen a crime-thriller that keeps my interest from beginning to end while not having to resort to almost any R-rated stuff.

 

    9 Stars.  I have two other books from this series on my TBR shelf: The Maze (Book 2) and Bombshell (Book 17).  If they’re anywhere near as good as this book was, this could be a series that I get deeply into.

Hyperspace - Michio Kaku

   1994; 334 pages.  Full Title: Hyperspace – A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10^th Dimension.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Quantum Physics; Astrophysics; Science.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    We live in a universe that has ten dimensions.  Not nine.  Not eleven.  Not three.  Not four.  There’s an outside chance that it actually has twenty-six dimensions, but let’s not go there.  Trying to visualize ten dimensions is going to be enough of a challenge.

 

    Part of that is our eyes’ fault.  We “see” in only three dimensions – length, width, and depth.  We might say we also “see” in a fourth dimension, time, and that’s valid, but it’s a temporal dimension, and here we are focusing on spatial ones.

 

    Physicists say the magic number is ten, and hey, they’re pretty smart.  But they admit they can’t see those extra dimensions either, their instruments can’t detect them, and they have no idea where those added dimensions might be hiding.  I have to wonder then, why do they even think such things exist?

 

    Michio Kaku gives us the answer early in this book: "The laws of nature are simpler in higher dimensions."

 

    Whatever that means.  And that's why I decided to read Hyperspace.

 

What’s To Like...

    Michio Kaku divides the fifteen chapters in Hyperspace into four sections, namely:

    Part 1: Entering the Fifth Dimension (Chapters 1-4)

        The early days of theorizing about higher dimensions, up through Einstein’s “e = mc²”.

    Part 2: Unification in Ten Dimensions  (Chapters 5-9)

        Quantum Physics, Superstrings, and what happened before the Big Bang.

    Part 3: Wornholes: Gateway to Another Universe?  (Chapters 10-12)

        Black Holes, Parallel Universes, and Time Machines.

    Part 4: Masters of Hyperspace.  (Chapters 13-15)

        How the World ends and how Ten Dimensions may provide an escape hatch.

 

    The chapters all have catchy titles, such as “Mathematicians and Mystics”, “The Man Who ‘Saw’ the Fourth Dimension”, “Einstein’s Revenge”, and “Signals from the Tenth Dimension”.  I found each section to be fascinating, but my favorite was Part 3’s chapters where Michio Kaku shows how to create a black hole that connects with a parallel world (which is not the same as a “multiverse”), how to build a Time Machine, and how we might interact with Multiverses.

 

     Michio Kaku demonstrates a clever way to visualize a fourth spatial dimension by creating a two-dimensional world (a stick figure on a sheet of paper), and asks us to imagine what happens if we “peel” that guy off the sheet of paper and immerse him in our 3-D world.  His eyes only work in two dimensions, so he sees magical things appearing out of nowhere, then disappearing just as miraculously.  Amazingly, a book was written in 1884 about such a two-dimensional world, titled Flatland by Edwin Abbot Abbot.  My local digital library has several copies of it (it is only of novella length), and I’ll probably borrow and read it sometime soon.

 

    There is of course lots of “sciency” stuff in the book, including mathematics (learn what’s so special about the number “1729”), chemistry (what phases does an ice cube undergo as you heat it to 10^{32 °}K), and futurology (eight different ways the world might end).  We spend a lot of time examining subatomic particles (there are hundreds of different kinds of them), and even how a much-ridiculed branch of mysticism called Theosophy embraced the concept of higher dimensions.

 

    As I expected, Michio Kaku’s infectious optimism shines throughout the book, but it was also enlightening to learn some anecdotal details of his life.  In high school, he built his own atom smasher in his parents’ garage, no small feat both from an engineering and a financial standpoint.  And watching the carp swim around in a pond at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco triggered his youthful mind to ponder the imponderable: higher dimensions.  I am in awe of his thought processes.

 

Excerpts...

    Throughout this book, we have emphasized the fact that the laws of physics unify when we add higher dimensions.  When studying the Big Bang, we see the precise reverse of this statement.  The Big Bang, as we shall see, perhaps originated in the breakdown of the original ten-dimensional universe into a four- and six-dimensional universe.  Thus we can view the history of the Big Bang as the history of the breakup of ten-dimensional space and hence the breakup of previously unified symmetries.  This, in turn, is the theme of this book in reverse.  (pg. 195)

 

    Futurology has deservedly earned this unsavory reputation because every “scientific” poll conducted by futurologists about the next decade has proved to be wildly off the mark.  What makes futurology such a primitive science is that our brains think linearly, while knowledge progresses exponentially.  For example, polls of futurologists have shown that they take known technology and simply double or triple it to predict the future.  Polls taken in the 1920s showed that futurologists predicted that we would have, within a few decades, huge fleets of blimps taking passengers across the Atlantic.  (pg. 276)

 

As we approach the speed of light, we are blissfully unaware that we are turning into slow-witted pancakes.  (pg. 83 )

    I can’t find much to quibble about Michio Kaku’s writing, opinions, and/or scientific history in Hyperspace.  My biggest criticism has to do with the theories themselves, which were developed by other physicists along the way.

 

    It isn’t that those theories are wrong – it’s that in most cases they can’t be verified by testing.  The ten-dimension universe is a mathematical construct created by physicists to aid in finding the elusive GUT, the “Grand Unified Theory” which will unite the laws of macro-physics (“Newtonian”), micro-physics (Quantum), and Gravity into one cohesive and easy-to-understand system.  Thus far, GUT is a pipe-dream, ten dimensions or not.

 

    I could gripe that I had almost zero comprehension of Chapter 6, “Einstein’s Revenge”, but that’s mostly a reflection of my mental acuity (or lack thereof), not the author’s presentation.  Also , a section in the concluding Chapter of the book regarding "Holism vs. Reductivism" seemed silly to me, but then, I’m solidly in the Reductivist camp, and it’s really more relevant to the arts than to science.

 

    That’s about it.  To be clear, Hyperspace was a slow-yet-fascinating read for me, which is what I expect whenever I pick up a book on Quantum Physics.  It answered my fundamental question: “What’s the Big Deal about Ten Dimensions”, and if there’s no direct evidence for it, along with multiverses, parallel worlds, time travel, and wormholes, well, so what?  Check back in a thousand years or so (or maybe just a hundred), and the answer will quite likely be significantly different.

 

    9 Stars.  If you’ve been thinking about reading a book on Quantum Physics, but are scared that it will all be “over your head”, here’s my present list of writers on the subject, ranked from “most reader-friendly” to “most challenging”:  Lisa Randall - Michio Kaku - Neil DeGrasse Tyson - Brian Greene - Stephen Hawking.   The order is subject to change as I read more books, and additions of other authors as I broaden my literary-&-scientific horizons. 

Burn Baby Burn - James Maxey

    2011; 205 pages.  Full Title: “Burn Baby Burn, A Supervillain Novel”.  Book 2 (out of 3) in the “Whoosh! Bam! Pow!” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Superheroes; Fantasy; Sci-Fi; Romance.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    Let’s face it, being a supervillain sucks.  Royally.

 

    Oh sure, sometimes the baddie is more interesting than the superhero.  Batman is boring compared to the Riddler or the Penguin.  Catwoman may be sexier, but in the end, you know Batman’s going to prevail.  Spiderman never loses to Doctor Octopus, no matter how many times Doc Ock goes up against him.  Lex Luthor may be an evil genius, but Superman always outsmarts him.  Not even my favorite supervillain, the imp from the fifth dimension, Mister Mxyzptlk, (try saying that five times real fast) has ever overcome the Man of Steel.

 

    The truth is: if you’re a supervillain, you’re shafted.  You may live to fight another day, but that just means you’ll fail again.  Your motives are predestined to be bad, and the only thing you can look forward to is a superhero arriving on the scene just in time to thwart your plans.  Just once I’d like to hear someone say, “this was a fine, fine day to be a supervillain.”

 

    That happens in Burn Baby Burn.

 

What’s To Like...

    In Burn Baby Burn, the two protagonists, Pit Geek and Sunday, are both legitimate supervillains.  They rob banks and kill cops and innocent bystanders, all in the name of destabilizing the world.  Yet their underlying motives and sense of honor aren't far from those of the three superheroes sent to bring them in, dead or alive, and both sides’ superpowers are roughly equal.

 

    Burn Baby Burn is the middle tale in a three-book series.  There are a couple references to characters and events from Book 1, which I haven’t read, and I don’t think I was missing much.  The title refers to the female protagonist, who goes by various monikers, including Sunday, Sunny, Sundancer, Burn Baby, and Baby Burn.  She can fly, create mini wormholes, and shoot fire out of her hands.  Pit Geek can generate space warps, is immortal, and can swallow just about anything and everything.  Incredibly, the three superhero antagonists have even greater superpowers.

 

    A lot of the story is set in the Carolinas, plus a brief visit to Guantanamo.  You’ll also visit a newly-formed island country called Pangea, inhabited by super-intelligent chimps.  The action is fast-paced, and there are lots of neat gadgets such as the “Regeneration Ray Gun”.  I have to admit I didn’t “get” a play on words in a character’s name, “Rex Monday” but James Maxey explains it a bit later.

 

    The ending was good, with lots of excitement and some keen twists that made the resolution of the super-fighting completely unexpected to me.  This is a short-&-fast read, and for me it was a page-turner as well.  It’s a standalone story, and part of a series only to the degree that a few of the characters might make it into the following book.

 

Excerpts...

    “Everyone dies.  Everyone.”

    “You don’t.”

    “Yeah,” he said.  “I do.  A little every day.  You ain’t looking at a living man.  You’re looking at a corpse too stupid to call it quits.”

    “You keep saying you’re stupid,” she said, brushing her hair back from her face, “but the more I listen to you, the more I suspect you’re secretly kind of smart.”

    “That’s just my dumbness rubbing off on you,” he said.  (loc. 2014)

 

    “You drove your vehicle into my vehicle.  You met my attempt at telepathic communication with an act of violence.  The kinetic energy of your weapon shattered my form and lodged my components within the matrix of your nervous system.”

    “Vehicle?” said Pit.  “You were driving a damn purple elephant down a dark highway!  I wouldn’t have hit you if you’d been in something with headlights.”  (loc. 3320)

 

Kindle Details…

    Burn Baby Burn is currently priced at $2.99 at Amazon, the same as the other two books in the series.  James Maxey has a couple dozen other “comic-book style” e-books and bundles; they range in price from free to $4.99.

 

“The dung you fling at your enemy sticks beneath your own nails.”  (loc. 3114 )

    There are a couple quibbles.  There’s a bunch of cussing – 18 instances in the first 20%, which is where I stopped counting – and some “adult sexual situations”.  It makes me wonder who the target audience is.  The R-rated stuff will attract adult readers, but does it come at the cost of losing the juvenile crowd?

 

    Of greater concern are the typos.  There were enough of them for it to be distracting.  Her/Here, he/his, its/sits, skid/skidded, jacked/jacket, petal/pedal, etc.  Plurals often included an apostrophe, Sao Paulo changed gender to Sao Paula, the chemical acid/base indicator is “pH”, not “ph”, and one character’s last name was “Christenson” one time and “Christianson” the next.  Most of these are just spellchecker errors, and if there were proofreaders involved, they should be shot.

 

    Despite the editing issues, I enjoyed Burn Baby Burn.  It kept me interested throughout, had lots of thrills and spills,, and James Maxey’s witty writing style fully suits this “superhero” story.  So if you’re hankering for a return to your comic book “youth”, but are now too “adult” to be caught doing so, Burn Baby Burn is a perfect fit for you.

 

    7½ Stars.  We’ll close with a supervillain tip from Sunny.  If your superpower happens to be bursting into flame, remember to strip first before using it.  It’ll save you a ton of money for new clothing to replace what you were wearing which gets incinerated when you turn yourself into a blowtorch.

Fragments - Monique Martin

   2013; 242 pages.  Book 3 (out of 11) in the “Out of Time” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Time Travel; Romance.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It’s kind of neat to see a coworker’s picture in the newspaper.  In this case, it’s Evan Eldridge one of Elizabeth West’s and Professor Simon Cross’s colleagues.

 

    The picture is from September 18, 1942.  You can’t really call it “old” because Evan, Elizabeth, and Simon all are time travelers, and members of something called "The Council for Temporal Studies".  Indeed, Evan’s wife Lillian is waiting for him to "return home" to San Francisco in 1906.

 

    Well, it’s good to see Evan’s alive and well.  Except that he isn’t.  The caption that accompanies his photograph reads “Some men lose more than their homes.  For some, their identities are stolen by shell shock induced amnesia.”

 

    Hmm.  Evan was undoubtedly on a mission for the Council at the time, and apparently something went horribly wrong.  His amnesia explains why he’s late in getting back to Lillian, and why he’s a patient at Guy’s Hospital in London, England, a city which, in September 1942, was subject to nightly bombings by the German Luftwaffe.

 

    Someone should go rescue him.  Someone like Simon and Elizabeth.

 

What’s To Like...

    Fragments is the third novel in Monique Martin’s time-travel/romance series titled “Out of Time”.  I’ve been reading the tales in order so far, partly because I bought Books 1 through 3 as a bundle.  The two earlier novels were set in 1929 New York and 1906 San Francisco; now for the first time our protagonists are going to experience living in a war zone.

 

    There are three main plot threads to follow.  Simon and Elizabeth need to figure out what Evan's mission was in 1942 London, and since they’re “freelancing”, they can’t expect the Council for Temporal Studies to provide any information.  If/When they figure out what his assignment was, they need to complete it for him, and after that, somehow spring him from Guy’s Hospital and reunite him with Lillian.  His amnesia seems just a bit too coincidental, so it’s reasonable to expect that there will be some baddies to contend with.

 

    This is my favorite setting so far in the series.  I liked the realistic "feel" of being in London with its nightly bombings, barrage balloons, strictly-enforced blackouts, and all sorts of foreign secret agents scampering around spying on each other and engaging in skullduggery.  I also liked that there was an “is it natural or supernatural” aspect to the quest.  There’s only about a dozen or so major characters to follow, and the most noteworthy one of them, Jack, will soon be “promoted” by Monique Martin into having his very own series.

 

    I learned a new way to apologize in French: “Il s’aggissait d’un accident.  Sa chaussure.  Erreur.”  You also get to learn smidgens of Latvian and what I presume is Albanian.  When’s the last time you saw those two languages worked into a story?  The inclusion of a couple of German expressions, (Wunderhubsch and Scheisse) was not surprising since you know full well some German spies will be skulking around in London.

 

    Rudolf Hess gets a brief mention, so does Glenn Miller and Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.  If you're not reading this series in order, that's okay, there’s a brief backstory giving the highlights of the first two books in the series early on.  Since I was reading them from a bundle,  the book location references are given relative to the 3-book bundling.

 

    The ending is decent, with some excitement and the main thread (freeing Evan) completely resolved.  The baddies get their just deserts, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of them resurface in later books.  Jack gets to initiated into the art of time-traveling, which of course is a prerequisite for jumping into his own series.  The Epilogue left a lump in my throat.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Bedsits (n., plural.) : one-room apartments typically consisting of a combined bedroom and sitting room with cooking facilities.  (a Britishism)

 

Excerpts...

    “This is different,” she said.

    Simon narrowed his eyes.

    “It is.  First of all, we didn’t leave him in the past.  He was part of the future when we were in the past and now that we’re in the future, he’s part of our past, but it isn’t the same past, so it doesn’t count.”

    “Elizabeth.”

    “Don’t ‘Elizabeth’ me right now.”  (loc. 8130)

 

    A few more regulars came in and joined the old man.  One of them leaned over to their table and said, “These dirty of sods want to know if you’re married.”

    “I am,” Elizabeth said, wiggling her ring finger and eliciting groans from the men.  She giggled.  “You all are so handsome, surely you’ve been snatched up.”

    The old man raised his glass.  “Lost me wife in ’38.”

    “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said.

    “Every night,” he said, “I be praying the old bat don’t find me.”  (loc. 9829)

 

Kindle Details…

    Fragments presently sells for $2.99 at Amazon.  Book 1, Out of Time, is free, and Book 2, When The Walls Fell, is also $2.99.  The rest of the books in the series are $3.99 apiece.  Alternatively, you can get Books 1-3 in a bundle for $4.99.

 

Things that sound dirty but aren’t…

    “It wasn’t every day she got to fork a Nazi spy.”

 

“You know, for a comedy, The Divine Comedy is not a lot of laughs.”  (loc. 7894 )

    The quibbles are negligible.  I never did figure out how the Germans knew Simon was a professor.  If this wasn’t an oversight on my part, then the Council for Temporal Studies has a leak.  Also, the fact that two penumbral eclipses (aka "lunar eclipses") occur within a couple days of each other seems to me unlikely from an astronomy point of view, although I’m not motivated to check this out to confirm things.

 

    Some of the plot threads, including the “natural or supernatural” question, are not fully tied up, but commenting further on this would involve spoilers.  Let’s just say that Evan’s mission may or may not have been completely resolved.  But perhaps this is addressed again at some later point in the series.

 

    There’s a bit of cussing, but not much, and seems mostly limited to variations of “hell” and “damn”.  I think it says something about the author’s writing skills that she doesn’t have to resort to “shock talk” much to tell a fascinating tale.

 

    I think Fragments is my favorite book in the series so far.  Maybe it was because of the wartime setting.  Maybe it was because the time-travel aspect took precedence over the romance.  Maybe Monique Martin’s writing is just getting better with each book.  All I know is that it was fun to read.

 

    7 Stars.  I chuckled at the brief mention of the difference between the “London Bridge” and the “Tower Bridge”.  The image most people think when they hear the first term actually applies to the second one.  I know this because I lived for a short time in Lake Havasu City, Arizona way back when it was first getting started.  Its developer, Robert McCulloch, went to London and spent a bunch of money buying the London Bridge.  He thought he was getting the one was those fabulous towers and drawbridge.  Instead he got the plain-jane one, which you can see if you ever visit Lake Havasu.

The Andromeda Evolution - Daniel H. Wilson

 

   2019; 417 pages.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the Andromeda Strain series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres: Techno-Thriller; Science Fiction; End of the World.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    Something black was rising from the deepest jungle.  Something very big.  (pg. 7)

 

    Fortunately, after the near-disastrous Andromeda Strain episode fifty years earlier, the world was keeping an eye out for something like this, by means of a top secret endeavor called "Project Wildfire".  A response team is quickly assembled and flown down to the remotest part of the Amazon rainforest, to intercept and examine this rapidly-growing whatever-it-is (and quickly dubbed “the anomaly”) and hopefully determine what it is and what it intends to do.

 

    The team is multinational.  Its leader is Dr. Nidhi Vedala, born in the slums of Mumbai, but presently a professor at MIT and an expert in nanotechnology.  Dr. Harold Odhaimbo‘s specialty is Xenogeology; he’s been flown in from his home in Kenya.  Peng Wu is the People’s Republic of China’s representative; she’s a taikonaut (see below) and has an extensive chemistry background.  Then there’s James Stone, kind of a computer whiz, but here mostly because he’s the son of Dr. Jeremy Stone, who was a key player in the struggle against the Andromeda Strain all those year ago.  The final member is astronaut Sophie Kline, currently residing on the International Space Station, and who will supply laboratory support and relay communications to and from the expedition.  There is no Wi-Fi in the Amazon jungle.

 

    Besides its mind-boggling growth rate and incredibly remote location, there are already a couple other odd things known about the anomaly.  It is located right on the flight path where a Chinese space station recently fell back to Earth strewing fiery debris as it came down through the atmosphere.  Hmm, I wonder what Peng Wu knows about that.

 

    Stranger yet, the anomaly is located on the equator.  Not within a few miles of it, not “nearby”.  Directly on it.  The odds of that being a random event are …well… astronomical.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Andromeda Evolution is the 50-years-later sequel to Michael Crichton’s 1969 megahit The Andromeda Strain.  Michael Crichton died in 2008; his widow, Sheri, recruited Daniel H. Wilson to write this book, a daunting task since this was Crichton’s breakthrough novel, and his writing style is both technically persuasive and a thrilling page-turner.  If you haven’t read Crichton’s book, that’s okay, a synopsis of it is given as a backstory on pages 13-15.

 

    The book is divided into seven sections: “Day Zero” which serves as a Prologue; then the five days in which our heroes investigate and respond to the anomaly; and finally “Resolution”, which serves as a brief prelude to the Epilogue.  The chapters aren’t numbered, but Daniel H. Wilson gives them each a descriptive title, which clues the reader to what’s about to go down.

 

     I liked that Sophie Kline has suffered all her life from JALS (Juvenile Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis).  On Earth this would relegate her to a wheelchair, but she’s never let it hold her back from her dreams, and in the weightlessness of outer space, it is somewhat of an advantage.  It reminded me of Robert Heinlein’s habit of endowing his protagonists with disabilities, and that’s a rare event in sci-fi novels.

 

    You’ll learn a smattering of Portuguese (“muito inteligente”) and Russian (“udachi”, “bozhe moi”).  I could suss out the first one, and thanks to Google, I know what the two Russian expressions mean.  The question of “terrestrial-or-extraterrestrial?” runs throughout the book, and I always enjoy that. The ability to do analytical chemistry in the Amazon jungle was fascinating, and I marveled at the canary drones and the robonauts.  The computerized language learning program was a clever way to overcome the problem of communicating with Amazon natives, and I liked the way the story addresses the “Fermi Paradox”.

 

    The ending is appropriately tense and exciting.  Yes, it’s over-the-top, but that's acceptable for a techno-thriller, as are a couple of dei ex machina (“You need an axe?  I happen to have an axe!”).  There’s a nice twist in the Epilogue, and the door is left open for more installments in this series.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Taikonaut (n.) : a Chinese astronaut.

 

Excerpts...

    There exists a certain class of event that can technically occur, yet is so incredibly unlikely that most laymen would consider it impossible.  This false assumption is based on a rule of thumb called Borel’s fallacy: “Phenomena with extremely low probabilities effectively never happen in real life”.

    Of course, the mathematician Emile Borel never said such a thing.  Instead, he proposed a law of large numbers, demonstrating that given a universe of infinite size, every event with nonzero probability will eventually occur.  Or put another way – with enough chances, anything that can happen will happen.  (pg. 20)

 

    Hopper nodded, pointing at the monitor.  “What are those faint speckles? All of them seem to be the same temperature, but cooling fast.”

    At his desk, Sugarman put his face close to his dedicated feed.  He spoke briefly into his headset to another analyst.  Finally, he responded.

    “We believe those are dead bodies, ma’am.  About fourteen of them.  Human.”

    “You can’t possibly confirm that, Airman.  Plenty of large primates live in that area of the world.”

    “Some of them are carrying spears, ma’am.”  (pg. 24)

 

“In a disaster … individual personality does not matter.  Almost everything you do is going to make it worse.” (Michael Crichton)  (pg. 93 )

    There’s hardly anything to quibble about in The Andromeda Evolution.  The text sometimes gives hints as to who in the expedition will live and who will die, but those are mostly chapter-ending teasers, and usually ambiguous.  Besides, even if you know the “who”, you don’t know the “when” and the “how”.

 

    There are only a couple instances of cussing.   I think I counted four.  It’s a mark of a skilled writer when he can thrill the daylights out of you without resorting to a plethora of curse words.

    The “Acknowledgements” section in the front of the book is written as if the events in the story were real.  I thought that was clever; sadly, very few readers will bother to read that section.

 

    Finally, I note that Michael Crichton’s name dwarfs Daniel H. Wilson’s on the book’s cover.  That’s a savvy marketing ploy, and justifiable since he conceived the series’ storyline and wrote Book One.  But still, he didn’t have much to do with this one.  This is the second book I’ve read recently where this situation arose (the other one is reviewed here), and I think it’s a mixed blessing to be chosen to continue a famous author’s series after he’s passed away.

 

    In the end, the key questions are:  1.) Was Daniel H. Wilson successful in copying Michael Crichton’s literary style?  2.) Was The Andromeda Evolution just as thrilling, scientifically speculative, and convincing as Crichton’s original?  3.) Would I recommend this book to readers thirsting for another Michael Crichton book?  The answers are: Yes, Yes, and Yes.

 

    8 Stars.  Fiction or not, I thought The Andromeda Evolution was a timely read, given that we mired in a seemingly unending pandemic and have to deal with a vocal and confrontational minority who hold that the proper strategy is “ignore it and it will go away.”

Bad Guys - Linwood Barclay

   2005; 370 pages.  Book 2 (out of 4) in the “Zack Walker” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Crime Humor.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

     Recently, there have been a couple cases of breaking-&-entering around the city at high-end men’s stores, and Zack Walker, feature writer for the local newspaper The Metropolitan is covering part of the investigation.

    Okay, so he’s not covering the criminal investigation; that would be infringing on coworker Dick Colby’s “crime reporter” turf, and Dick’s known to be very territorial about it.  Actually, all Zack’s doing is taking notes while riding along with Lawrence Jones, a private investigator hired by an owner of a men’s store that has yet to be burglarized.

    “Riding” is an overstatement.  For the most part, they’re spending the whole night sitting in an unmarked car, watching who drives by the store, and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.  Zack’s note-taking so far – he’s going to write a feature article about the PI business from all this – has covered what not to drink before a stakeout (no caffeine!) and how to … um … deal with excretory functions, if needed, without getting out of the car.

    When another private investigator dies in a hit-and-run while watching a different men’s store, it could have been an unfortunate accident.  But then when Lawrence is assaulted, it starts to look like a pattern.

    And Zack just might be the next target.

 What’s To Like...

    Bad Guys is the second book in Linwood Barclay’s Zack Walker series.  I read Book One back in 2014; it is reviewed here.  Book 4 was published in 2007 and there have been none after that, so I presume this is a completed series.

     The book is written in the first-person POV (Zack’s), and with 40 chapters covering 370 pages, it’s easy to find a good place to stop.  There aren’t a lot of characters to follow, but they’re all fun to meet-&-greet, even the baddies.  Unlike Book One, this is a whodunit, as well as a “whydunit”.

     Besides the crime angle, there’s also an equally interesting second plotline involving Zack’s family life.  Zack loves his wife Sarah, but she also happens to be his boss at the newspaper, and that leads to some touchy moments.  They have two kids – Angie, aged 18, and Paul, aged 16 – and all parties cope with the usual teenage/parent anxieties.  Zack can’t help himself, he wants to know what’s going on in his kids' lives, and his efforts to find things out lead to some awkward-but-funny situations.

     I liked the reference to the “Homer Simpson and his potato chips in space” nod, and the “Girl Scout leaders in stilettos” reference was a hoot.  I also learned that in a race between an SUV and a hybrid car, put your money on the SUV.  And be careful when taking a sip from a bottle of Snapple.

     The ending is clever, exciting, and stutter-step, the latter thanks to nifty twist that I never saw coming.  Overall, I was impressed by the “tightness” in the plot structure.  A half dozen other plot threads arise for Zack to suss out; they all get resolved by the end of the book, and it felt like all of the events along the way, no matter how small, factored into one plot thread or another.

 Excerpts...

    “So when you’re writing, doing your work, doesn’t that help get your mind off other things?  Isn’t that a good way to reduce your anxiety level?

    I nodded.  “For the most part.”

    “So, what are you working on now?  Another book?”

    Well, I’m back with a paper now, The Metropolitan, doing features.  You can’t exactly make a living writing books.”

    “I liked that one you did, about the guy goes back in time to kill the inventor of those hot-air hand dryers in men’s rooms before he’s born.  That wasn’t a bestseller?”

    “No,” I said.

    Harley looked surprised.  (loc. 136)

    “How about you?” I asked.  “You seeing someone?”  Paul put the fork into his mouth, his cheek poking out on one side.  I went on, “What about, what was her name, Wendy?”

    Paul shook his head.  He chewed a few times, washed the linguine down with some water.  “I never went out with her.  Besides, she has a butter face.”

    “A butter face?”

    “Yeah.  Everything’s great, but her face.”  (loc. 3117)

 Kindle Details…

    At the moment, you can pick up Bad Guys for a mere  $1.99 at Amazon.  Book One, Bad Move, sells for $8.99; Book 3, Lone Wolf, is $7.99, and the final book, Stone Rain, also goes for $1.99 right now.

    Linwood Barclay offers another dozen-plus full-length e-novels at Amazon, all in the crime fiction genre and, I believe, most written in a more serious vein.  They sell for anywhere from $4.99 to $18.99.

“Girl Scout leaders wear stilettos?”  (loc. 1025 )

    There’s not much to quibble about in Bad Guys.  There’s a lot of cussing in it; I counted 14 instances in the first 10%, and I think that’s representative of the rest of the book.  I’d call it excessive if it weren’t for the fact that Linwood Barclay has the writing skills to make it feel like the cussing fits the mood.  If you prefer your mysteries to be cozies, you should probably skip this series.

     Other than that, the only nit I can pick is that I figured out Trevor’s “secret” immediately, and long before Zack did.

    Bad Guys is a fast-paced delightful crime-humor tale that kept me turning the pages wondering what was going to happen next.  I enjoyed Bad Move as well, and don’t know why it took me six years to read the sequel.  I also don’t know why Linwood Barclay stopped the series after four books; here’s hoping he restarts it at some point in the near future. 

     8½ Stars.   We’ll close with two teasers from the book that I’d put in the category “sounds dirty but isn’t”: a character’s nickname of “Cheese Dick Colby”, and a snippet of text “You’re hot, Dad, very hot.  But please pull your pants back up.”

Lord Foul's Bane - Stephen R. Donaldson

   1977; 474 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Book 1 (out of 10) in the series “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”, and Book 1 (out of 3) in the subseries “The First Chronicles”.  Genres : Epic Fantasy.  Overall Rating: 5*/10.

    There’s no other explanation for it – this has to be a dream.

    That’s the logical conclusion Thomas Covenant comes to about the strange new world he suddenly finds himself in.  For one thing, he’s painfully aware (literally) that he suffers from the most terrifying disease of all – leprosy.  Yet in this new world, he seems to be magically on the way to recovery.

    For another thing, there’s a couple of nasty people – and we use that term loosely – that he meets who want to charge him with a task: deliver a message of doom to a bunch of people he’s never met and has no idea where they dwell.  Ah well, at least this is going to be an exciting dream.

    Of course, a skeptic may question the duration of this “dream”: it seems to go on for days on end.  But Thomas has an explanation for that – the last thing he remembers in the “real world” was stepping out in front of a speeding police car.  Maybe he’s in a coma and dreaming.

    But the clincher for the dream hypothesis is a song-singing, tale-telling muscles-rippling guy named Saltheart Foamfollower.  Who stands out in a crowd.  Literally.  He's twelve feet tall.

    You don’t see many twelve-foot humans walking around in the real world.

What’s To Like...

    Lord Foul’s Bane is the opening book in Stephen R. Donaldson’s ten-volume Epic Fantasy series called “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”.  The series is further divided into three trilogies, with the final one actually having a fourth book in it.

    If you like your protagonists to be anti-heroic (and I do), Thomas Covenant is your kind of guy.  He’s rude to everyone, is quick to anger, wallows self-pity, and shouldn’t be left alone with young girls.  I’m hard-pressed to recall a less-likable protagonist than this, and I'm going to presume that he gets nobler as the series progresses.

    If you loved Lord of the Rings, and are searching for something similar, this is also your answer.  Dwarves and Elves abound (although they go by different names); there’s a “Ring of Power”; a perilous journey to Rivendell, (oops, I mean “Revelstone”), a Gollum equivalent; the Mirkwood Forest becomes the Morinmoss Forest; Mount Doom becomes Mount Thunder, and wearing the ring while baddies are nearby may be hazardous to your finger.  All that’s missing is some hobbits and Tom Bombadil.  Rest assured however, the way everything gets resolved here is markedly different from LOTR.

    As would be expected, there are a bunch of storylines to follow.  To wit:

    a.) Just how “real” is Thomas’s fantasy land?

    b.) Is he really Berek Halfhand reincarnated?

    c.) Why is the moon incarnadine (see below)?

    d.) What is “wrong” with the land?

    e.) Will Thomas live to deliver his message?

Another half-dozen or so plot threads spring up along the way, but this is a spoiler-free review.

    The text is a vocabularian’s delight.  The moon isn’t red, it’s incarnadine.  A face isn’t ugly, it’s roynish.  If you don’t like fifty-cent words used where a five-cent one would do, this can get tedious, but I thought it was done well.  A couple of my favorites are listed below, and there were dozens more.  I also liked the brief mention of synesthesia on page 24: “sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre.”

    There’s a tremendously-useful Glossary in the back.  Bookmark it, you will be referring to it a lot.  There’s also a map in the front, although in my mass-market paperback it was kind of blurry.  The chapters are moderately long, averaging just under 20 pages each.  There’s a fair amount of cussing, but the choice of words is limited to variations of “hell” and “damn”, which overall are pretty tame.

    The ending is exciting and spread over about a hundred pages, and I consider that a plus.  Some good guys die; some bad guys don’t, and there's a neat twist in the epilogue that I never saw coming.  Very few of the storylines listed above are tied up, but hey, this is just the start of a ten-book series, and the main aims of the quest place upon our heroes here do get resolved.

Kewlest New Word ...

Roynish (adj., archaic) : mangy, scabby.

Others: Carious (adj.); Eyot (n.); Demesne (n.); Benighted (adj.).

Excerpts...

    “I did not know that it is your custom to make strangers prisoner.”

    The man who held the torch stepped forward and bowed seriously.  “When we are sure, we will ask your pardon.  Until that time, you must come with me to a place where you may be examined.  We have seen strange tokens, and see more now.”  He nodded at Covenant.  “We would make no mistake, either in trust or in doubt.  Will you accompany me?”

    “Very well,” Atiaran sighed.  “But you would not be treated so in Mithil Stonedown.”

    The man replied, “Let the Stonedownors taste our troubles before they despise our caution.”  (pg. 134)

    Foamfollower’s question caught him wandering.  “Are you a storyteller, Thomas Covenant?”

    Absently, he replied, “I was, once.”

    “And you gave it up?  Ah, that is as sad a tale in three words as any you might have told me.  But a life without a tale is like a sea without salt.  How do you live?”  (…)

    “I live.”

    “Another?” Foamfollower returned.  “In two words, a story sadder than the first.  Say no more – with one word you will make me weep.”  (pg. 182)

“All you need to avid despair is irremediable stupidity or unlimited stubbornness.”  (pg. 386 )

    Sadly, there is much to quibble about in Lord Foul’s Bane.  The descriptions of the lands are long and numerous, the storyline’s pacing is incredibly slow, and while there is some fighting and intrigue in the first half of the book, Thomas doesn’t get pulled into the action until around page 300.  That’s a long time to wait for your protagonist to get involved.

    Foamfollower’s songs and tales are plentiful and “meh”.  I winced at a couple of typos (thing/think – page 93; spent/spend – page 94), I don’t expect such slips by a publisher such as Del Rey.  And as much as like anti-heroes, Thomas Covenant is just despicable.  Finally, the less said about the sexual assault scene, the better.

    I’ve been looking forward to reading something by this author for quite some time, and I have to admit, I came away disappointed.  According to Wikipedia, this was Stephen R. Donaldson first published book, so maybe it’s just a “diamond in the rough” and things improve hereafter.  It will be interesting to see if the thrills-&-spills and pacing pick up as the series progresses.

    5 Stars.  The last one hundred pages are very good, and make up for a lot of the plodding the reader has to do to get to it.  But a lot of readers are going to give up long before then.