Review: Quantum entanglement decoherence
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 14, 2012
With the $0.99 Kindle-only, indie-published offerings, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it's a draw. "Scarab", from first-time author Stavros Halvatzis, has little or nothing to do with pyramids, ancient Egypt or scarabs (apparently to the dismay of several reviewers).  It does, however, have something to do with the Sphinx, AI, and quantum computing.Our heroes (Emma, a 20-something film school student with, shall we say, "easy" morals, and Jack, a 40-something ex-alcoholic writer with a recently dead cat and no real prospects) become entangled with the nefarious schemes of an über-wealthy computer chip magnate, a murder or two, and end up fleeing to South Africa to confront the baddie in his secret lair.More a novella than a novel at roughly 176 pages on my iPad, Scarab occupied a not entirely unpleasant afternoon while I had the flu.  The writing was OK - no huge gaffes, hideous grammatical errors or abundance of typos that one often sees in the $0.99 Kindle offerings, and I think the author has potential.  The pacing was fine and kept my interest right until the last 12% or so when I could finally figure out where all this was going.There were a few things left unclear at the end - I never could figure out what the @%$^@ was up with the Sphinx that appears in the first chapter -  and the ending was a little too "happily ever after", but for a first try, not so bad.  I will gladly invest another $0.99 to see how Mr. Halvatzis develops.  Two and three quarter stars, rounded up to three for a new author.JM Tepper