Review: An Uneventful Adventure
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 25, 2013
Dangerous Latitudes is a book with a bit of promise but not much execution.  Like many much of the adventure genre, this book owes quite a bit to the Indiana Jones series, including entire scenes which were ripped straight out of the movie series (we'll get to that later).The setup is pretty simple, our hero Matthew Hunt is a travel writer who apparently spends most of his time adventuring.  When the beautiful academic Elena Lawson receives a coded letter from her long lost father, the adventure begins to find him.  He was looking for the mythical city of Z in Brazil, possibly home to a lost civilization and the fountain of life.Matthew and Elena then jaunt across the globe, looking for clues as to how to find the city.  Oddly, the vast majority of their clues seem to come from just asking people.  It isn't the most compelling puzzle novel.Of course on the other side is Zedillo, a generic bad guy who is dying and wants to find immortality at the fountain of life.  The biggest problem with the book is that just isn't that interesting.  The characters are flat, the story is rather plodding and predictable and even the final reveal barely makes any sense.The action is okay, if fairly sparse.  One particularly sad scene sees the author wholesale lifting the wooden bridge scene from Temple of Doom.  I half expected one of the bad guys to scream KALIMAAAAAA!  Seriously, read it, it is almost identical except 1.)  The main bad guy doesn't die in the scene.  2.)  Alligators are replaced with piranhas.That all being said, I finished the book, so I'll give it two stars.  But it isn't worth your time, there are plenty of adventure books out there without slogging through this one.**Review Copy was provided free of charge