Review: Amazing Characters, Initially Strangers, Fit Together Perfectly
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 26, 2014
Wow!  I don't usually read alien abduction novels, but this one was really good.  There are four disparate groups, and they all unite throughout the book as they seek one common objective -- to get to the bottom of a mysterious location in New Mexico where theories of alien sightings abound.The characters were multi-layered and perfect for the story.  Let me explain why.  You have a priest, who is devoted to God, and this type of story makes him question his beliefs, and ours as well.  You have a famous television personality, a trained scientist himself, who has staked his career on debunking the existence of aliens (as well as his adult daughter, who has a fascinating family relationship with him, striving to make her flawed father more human).  Then you have this insouciant drifter, with a fantastic fictional name, Johnny Riverbank, who likes better nothing than to smoke weed and hit the bars, and has nothing to lose by confronting the harsh reality of alien interference.  The interplay between the characters was deftly handled by the author through the format of mixing up chapters, each showing the perspective of the disparate characters. The chapters were purposely short, allowing the readers to impatiently await the insight of the other characters, in turn, as they all inched closer and closer to the resolution of the mystery.  In short, I just had to keep turning the pages, and I don't usually get that feeling in a book unless it's as good as this.Two things I really disliked about the book, but these can be eliminated by a good round of editing, so I'll definitely keep the top ranking.  The most serious one is all the swearing in the book.  I actually did a word search of one swear word and found ninety instances of it throughout the book.  I acknowledge people do use that swear word, but it was way overdone.  Secondly, there were a lot of lazy grammar errors, especially anything that had a possessive, like it's.  I even found one 'they're' where it should be 'their'. I implore the author, please fix these up so that your book can be perfect.The story itself is very well done.  I really liked the angle of having major characters impaired by substance abuse (one smokes weed, the other is an alcoholic) so that we're intrigued, in the light of alien presence, if it's reality or just all imagined by these characters, plus skepticism by their accomplices.