Yes, read while you are waiting at the airport lounge...or at the railway waiting room..or while visiting your dentist.
Frankly.. Mr Brown disappoints big time(much more than he did in the last thirteen pages of THE DA VINCI CODE after a stupendous buildup.
The Plot
At the start we have a Canadian scientist killed in the arctic icy wilderness by people who seem to be from the special forces...why?..is revealed in the last few pages. Then the main chapters start telling a story of a meteorite being found by NASA and which also has fossils of some kind of arthropoda from the outer space. This finding has been kept a hush hush secret and is to be corroborated by an independent team of scientists, oceonologists, a naturalist TV presenter and at an appropriate time the President of the US of A will announce to the world of this discovery..for what..hold it...here’s the twist in the tale..The Prez is fast losing popularity on grounds of inappropriate and fruitless funding of the NASA and stands to lose his chances for a second term. Breathing down his neck is senator Sexton who is gathering support for his plan of cutting down the budget allotment to NASA and is bent on proving that NASA has been a white elephant for the economy. Yes, there is also an almighty National Reconnaissance Org. (NRO) with a quaker of a head and whose ace employee is also in the Prez’s authentication team and who also happens to be the senator’s estranged daughter.
Then comes twist number two...The discovery is a fake..and there is an all out effort by a trio of specialist murderers..who have such weapons at their disposal as miniature robots the size of dragonflies and guns which fire compressed snow pellets et al. Anyone who come to know of the secret of the fraud meteorite is to be dispensed away with and in the most brutal way..
Of Course! we have our hero..the handsome TV presenter and Ms Sexton as the heroine. They battle all odds...get chased on an arctic shelf..survive after being marooned on a freezing ice berg..and recover from a deadly assault on a research ship while they are desperately trying to authenticate their discovery of the fraud and intimate the Prez. Well, they survive and in the course we are told about the nexus of the senator and the bad guys who wanna have privatization of space stuff and all that…Our hero and heroine finally win and also fall in love…eeks!..how predictable…
There are times when you think D Brown is imitating Sidney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey, Ian Fleming and a bit of Nick Carter…all the shades to make it a thriller…like I said earlier..to be read while waiting at the barber’s or when you pretty ladies are blow drying your hair. The all American penchant of being the most techno savvy..gizmo loving..space and ET crazy..and being in know of what’s going on in the world (read ..we can control)...is all there.
I really thought the probe into the meteorite and the debate about life being seeded on earth from another world would build up into something interesting..instead was treated to a two bit thriller..A damp squib indeed..But it is definitely a fast paced and adrenalin pumping read...and one would like to get over with the mystery much like The Hardy Boys...or The Three Investigators..in our school days.