Review: Medical Drama Mixed with Military Thriller
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 1, 2014
If you are in the mood for a military adventure replete with acronyms and action, a surly hero, an unsuspecting diplomat, and a double crossed husband intent on the dead-end of revenge, punctuated with poignant moments of medical drama, then you will want to read THE EMPTY QUARTER, Robbins' jargon steeped thriller. And yes, the jargon, acronyms, implied backgrounds, technological settings have a heavy presence with some minor explanatory footnotes for perhaps the more obscure ones.Having been a military linguist myself, I did catch the subtle reference to the service wide language proficiency test, known as the DLPT, when the score "3 out of 5" was obliquely mentioned, meaning the character had a basic native fluency as determined by the test (the benchmark score for all services). Other bits and unexplained hints I picked up from personal adjunct familiarity, yet there were still character interactions that required re-reads, which did nothing to illuminate the apparently assumed understanding. Some readers may well indeed have some difficulty getting past the interlaced specialized references; the fact that our surly hero's moniker is an acronym as well does not help much in a paragraph already filled with two or three others. Then, of course, there is the medical related scenes although I found these to be more elucidating than the solely military or cultural dedicated ones.The pacing is on spot throughout with the last portion of the book given over to the "wind down" with a fairly satisfying conclusion. Robbins plays out well the various plot lines into a single, climatic whole, each character true to the end without any sudden personality shifts. In terms of action and plot devices, the medical aspect notwithstanding, THE EMPTY QUARTER could be considered a typical genre offering. It is indeed this emergency triage element that proffers the reading "hook".The loss of the star is based singly on the sheer inundation of military technicalities and cultural terms with an enormous amount left unsaid. I have read too many Military Thrillers myself to shrug it off, knowing many authors of the same genre have managed the same depth of atmosphere without sacrificing civilian clarity.Nevertheless, if you enjoyed TV Medical Dramas such as GREY'S ANATOMY and movies like BLACK HAWK DOWN, then THE EMPTY QUARTER will most definitely satisfy.  I certainly had a few genuine moments of rooting out loud, and that sums it up in terms of a good reading experience.