Bill

Good story with some clumsy sermonizing

Revisado: 04-10-19

The overall story arc is very entertaining. Plenty of turns and twists. Iles does his usual good job of keeping you engaged over a long story. You really don't mind the length of the story. There's really very little dead-time to the story except for some rather lengthy intimacy scenes. Iles paints very vivid pictures of the town and environs of the town and environs and his characterizations of the main protagonist's father's failing health are especially powerful.

The only plot point that seems over the top is the bad guys having tens of millions of dollars to toss around. At one point where Marshall is negotiating you wonder if they would have agreed to sending him on a rocket-ship to the moon if he asked for it

Scott Brick does his usual solid job of narration. He's not like most narrators that try to over-do lines from the opposite sex that wind up just sounding silly. He stays in his lane pretty well.

Every few hours you get internal dialogues or discussions on the evils of Trump's America for some reason. For the politically agnostic like myself, it's a irritant for someone to burnish their political bona fides when there's not much reason to toss in that non-sequitur. It takes a bit away from a generally well-told story.

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esto le resultó útil a 18 personas

I liked it despite the over the top plot twists

Revisado: 08-06-18

The thing I liked about this one is usually the spy/thriller genre seems to follow predictable groupings of "bad guys of the year." This year almost everyone has the Russians, last year, it was the Chinese, the year before ISIS, etc. and this one had a pretty unique plot.

There were some eye-rolling "tough guy" moments and if we're able to just sort of operate in North Korea as easily as mentioned in this book, I can't see why we haven't been able to stop more of their bad behavior in the first place. But if you suspend your disbelief a bit and roll with it, it's pretty enjoyable.

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What the heck was that?

Revisado: 05-14-18

I don't know what to even make of this other than Ted Bell is going into more fantastical and hard to believe "James Bond" pseudo-sci-fi plots. Vladimir Putin comes back as the main villain doing more crazy stuff that seems pretty well impossible between Russia and Switzerland. If you are willing to totally suspend your disbelief and your incredulity, you'll probably enjoy it better than I did. It was ok, just kind of crazy.

John Shea did a better job than usual, probably because the book was written so that he didn't have to do large numbers of British accents simultaneously. When he has to do more than 2 at the same time he seems like he's struggling to differentiate. And when he has to do both Russian and German/Swiss accents at the size time they tend to blend.

It was pretty good on the whole, but I expect the next one in the series to be where Putin commandeers the international space station and tries to take over the world.

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If you like chase stories this is your book

Revisado: 03-27-18

The plot was fairly interesting, written in the Cotton Malone "first person" voice which made it a bit more compelling. If you're familiar with the MLK "I've been to the mountain top" speech, you can figure out how the last hour of the "reveal" plays out.

Lots of danger followed by running to the next place where a baddie finds them, rinse, wash repeat.

Scott Brick does his Scott Brick thing. A solid job if you like Scott Brick generally. Somehow they had recordings of MLK where he sounds like a middle-aged midwesterner. Go figure. I never knew MLK had an Iowa accent when he wasn't giving speeches. Maybe MLK was so iconic, they just punted on trying to imitate him? Just a weird artistic choice.

Parts I really liked, parts were repetitive. I wavered between 5 star parts and 3 star parts thinking about it so it's a 4 star for me. If I can listen to it at work, lose the thread because I was distracted, go back and listen to what I missed and wonder why I did that sometimes, yeah, it gets formulaic. So a solid effort, if unspectacular.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Plot's a bit thin on this one

Revisado: 01-20-18

This one doesn't have the usual twists and turns of a Pendergast book. It's a relatively straightforward crime drama with Pendergast and D'Agosta as the main characters so it just doesn't feel as rich due to the lack of the secondary characters like Constance playing almost no part in the story.

It's a good, well-written story and goes by fast, but it felt too "normal" and not as interesting as others in the series.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Not Kovac and Liska but good all the same

Revisado: 01-02-18

I initially bought this book as part of what was listed as Kovac and Liska Book 5. It's only Kovac and Liska in Chapter One as bit parts. That being said, it's a solid mystery with above average narration.

The first 2 hours are painful because you can imagine the recovery from a traumatic brain injury of the main character, but it's worth hanging in there.

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Better than his 20th Century Trilogy

Revisado: 11-19-17

It was a little slow getting going as I was trying to connect the dots with the previous novels.

The pace was good with lots of intrigue between the families in France and England. Maybe it was due to the fact that this was placed several hundred years ago, but it seems he did a better job of not making the historical figures exaggerated caricatures of themselves. The other nice thing about this story is Follett didn't force his sometimes overly graphic sex scenes like he did in his 20th century Trilogy.

John Lee did a superb job narrating as always.

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More of the same

Revisado: 10-11-17

Same type of villains and heroes, except the villains seem less interesting this time or maybe I've grown immune to Brown's tropes and stereotyping. I guess a tiger never changes his stripes.

The performance was "meh" and so was the story. He clearly peaked at Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code and now it just feels like we're going over the same ground again and again. If you don't mind a few hours of lost useless yammering because of 20 minute dry holes in the book here and there you'll be ok. Just not a strong effort on the whole. It was good in spots, especially in the beginning, but not overall.

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More of the same

Revisado: 01-12-17

If you like action without a whole ton of plot development, this will be a good book for you. Most of the non-action plot is short and used to set up the overly long action segments. It's good as long as you keep that in mind.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Ridiculous premise, otherwise ok

Revisado: 04-08-16

If this were simply a spy story about ex-Soviet apparatchiks trying to smuggle in suitcase nukes into the US on inauguration day, that would have been fine, but the whole thing about idiosyncrasies in the the 20th amendment and the 1947 succession act throwing the US into turmoil seemed the most tenuously thin of premises.

If you throw out that degree of ridiculousness, the story is pretty good, but I have a hard time getting past the rationale for "master plan." Isn't blowing up the president/vice president & president/vice president-elect enough? Cabinet members and legislators will start suing each other to be the president? Please. I'm pretty sure we already account for that "just in case" so not everyone is on the stage at the same time.

But suspend your disbelief on that part and I'd give the story a sold 4-stars, but it's there so I gave it 3. Not quite as good as his best Cotton Malone books, but still pretty good.

Scott Brick does his usual sold job narrating. Good on the whole, but seemed to stretch credulity.

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