Review: Action-non stop
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 26, 2014
This book is certainly of the ODTAA variety. It is non stop action from the beginning to the end. Indeed you can just about detect which action movies, parts were modeled on. The Andromeda Strain underlies the entire book. There is a car chase scene right out of the Blues brothers. The mad criminal mastermind is right out of Die Hard and so on. So far so good, the author is reasonably adept at this sort of writing until he exceeds the bounds of reality in the last 10% of the book.But forget the plot because it totally strains belief from the start of the book. The idea that any government run by politicians would create a huge dangerous lab in the center of the country and hand control off to some third party is political fantasy. They do place an Andromeda Strain  device under this lab but when they want to detonate it the device is on some sort of timer. That might make sense if the inhabitants of the lab were warned by a countdown to evacuate but that does not happen. If you decided to blow the place up you would just go ahead and do it, push the button. Boom!Also the lefty environmentalist female protagonist and the Marine male protagonist has been done maybe in a thousand other books and movies.The book is loaded with other errors. The protagonist has a .45 cal model 1911 in one scene but it morphs into a 10mm later in the book. Setting a grenade off under a stack of charged 3000 psi scuba bottles would not just scatter the bottles around. And shooting holes in them would result in a more dramatic failure than an air leak.The whole story is zeroed in on who gets possession of some templates (read secret battleship plans from Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan stories). But the bad guys already have four copies of the templates and the good guy side has the female scientist who made the templates in the first place. And who could make more if needed. So why not just destroy the ones they are fighting over. And already having copies of the templates why do the bad guys go thru a great deal of trouble to get more of what they already have? It does not compute (Lost in Space)The creatures in the book have the usual supernatural strength, they are able to rip and bend thick steel bars and demolish heavy machinery with their tentacles.  Sorry, they are made of the same protoplasm as every other living creature and the strength of protoplasm does not overcome that of steel or other high strength materials. And the exploding plant spoor bullets fail the logic test oo. A gram of RDX explosive contains a heck of a lot more energy than any gram of plant seeds.So if you want a rip snorting non stop action tale and you can suspend your critical thinking. Then this is the book for you. I enjoyed it up to the 80% mark just by spotting where the author got the idea for a particular section of the book.