Review: Not really important to the series
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 6, 2012
***NOTE MY REVIEWS OFTEN CONTAIN SPOILERS***The Vespers are recruiting and the Vesper known as the Watcher has zeroes in on the Cahill children on the clue hunt as their potential candidates.  As Cahills they're young, talented, powerful and usually ruthless.  Not to mention they're in a perfect position to betray their powerful family to the Vespers.  But which Cahill child will she choose?  And will that person be willing to betray their own family?The story has a decent action filled plot with educational value and interesting plot twists.  However, the scene and character contradictions between this story and the original series drove me nuts and so it very hard for me to enjoy the story.  First of all in this story Sinead had long auburn hair, I could have sworn her hair was short in the original series.  In the Maze of Bones Amy and Dan were not at the museum that long before the triplets arrived, this story sets it at 40 minutes.  With as much as Amy reads and how little she read in the original museum scene there's no way on earth she reads that slow.  In the original series Ted lost his vision and Ned suffered debilitating headaches because of the museum accident.  The reason I mention this is it was a huge setback for the brothers because Ned was like the most brilliant and Ted did all this invention schematic drawing.  If Ted's thing was computer programming it wouldn't have been as huge because lots of people with handicaps, even blind ones do stuff with computers.  Here however Ned's just a decoy while Ted is writing programs to decode a lock.  It seems backwards from what has already been established for these characters.  I don't know what was off about Jonah Wizard exactly in this story, but I can say it just didn't' feel like the same character we read in the original series.  The thing that REALLY got me were the scenes with Eisenhower and Hamilton Holt.  Hamilton is smarter and more caring than the rest of  his family, that part of the portrayal felt right, but the rest was way off.  For one Hamilton loves the physical stuff just as much as his family, he's not the type of character to win about being in the middle of nowhere hiking in snow shoes, he'd consider that fun.  And he'd never have trouble keeping up physically with anyone in his family.  Eisenhower's top priority is his immediate family.  They are the most important thing in his life.  He may ignore his son's qualms about attacking a random tent, but he absolutely would not call his son a traitor and abandon him in the Arctic.  They guy's a jerk with an off kilter moral compass, yes, but respect and his family are everything to him and the portrayal of him here is insulting at best.  The most accurate portrayal would be Ian, but in the original series it wasn't until the last couple of books of the Clue Hunt that the Kambra children got off from under their mother's thumb.  I can't see Ian taking off to Ankor Watt without her permission at the point in the clue hunt where this occurs, even if he did want to impress her.I realize Riley didn't write any of the original clue books, but his spin off series is supposed to be taking place alongside the clue hunt so the characters should act completely the same.  And as his series was published well after the original books, he had more than enough time to read the series and if he wanted to write this, that series should have become his new bible during the process of writing these.  Instead his characterization is sloppy, like he figures he'll make these characters behave how he wants and none of the fans will notice.  The only reason I didn't give this book a lower rating is that if I hadn't read the original series I probably would have liked the story.  Instead I was kind of offended that Riley thought so little of clues fans that he barely attempted to keep their beloved characters the same.Overall this is a take it or leave it book.  I can't recommend it, but it's not like it was poorly written, just poorly researched.  It has no value to the franchise and could easily be skipped.