How does Rollins get away with it? I’ve never figured it out. Most thriller writers are lambasted for concepts that are wildly implausible, but not Mr. Rollins. A decade ago, he blew up San Francisco, the western US, and most of Japan in Deep Fathom. If I’m not mistaken, he blew up the Roman Coliseum, Angor Wat, and a couple National Parks as well. The Eye of God opens with the whole east coast left as a smoking ruin.
Or is it?
Mr. Rollins doesn’t write big-concept books, he writes wild-and-crazy-concept books. Either you let go of reality and love it or you roll your eyes and toss it aside.
I love wild and crazy—even though I’m a split second away from rolling my eyes and tossing it aside with every turn of the page. Helicopters that can fly across Asia at supersonic speeds (apparently), escapes from North Korean maximum security prisons against overwhelming odds, and elastic travel intervals are no big deal in any thriller.
But mashing up Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and a time-traveling satellite is something only James Rollins could pull off.
Series books always wrestle with the problem of reader-fatigue. The nine Sigma books suffer from that unavoidable issue. Arthur Conan Doyle solved the problem by killing Sherlock Holmes only to be relentlessly hounded by an upset public. Mr. Rollins once killed Sigma’s Monk only to bring him back in the next novel*.
In this one, Mr. Rollins finds a creative solution to reader-fatigue and I think you will find that it works quite well. It will certainly keep you on your toes when you read the next book.
The writing in this book feels different. It’s as if our already fine writer is trying to reach a new literary plane. (Literary novels are those beautifully written but horrifically boring books you read while waiting for something to happen during a baseball game.) Mr. Rollins’s writing was just fine ten years ago. This endeavor is also fine but has a few uncharacteristic phrases, such as:
She cursed that such a burden should come to rest in her small palms. How could the very fate of the world—both now and in the future—fall to her, a woman of only fourteen summers?
Really? Fourteen summers? Odd passages like this crop up from chapter to chapter – enough to make you laugh but not enough to hurt the story. Hopefully, he’ll just write his next book and tell his editor to STFU.
Overall: another great Sigma story with a few surprises to keep the fan base on their toes.
Peace, Seeley
* What was it … underwater-air-breathing-humanoids who dragged Monk off the bottom of the ocean and brought him back to life? Sure. That can happen. At least Mr. Rollins didn’t take the lifeless corpse back to Planet Vulcan to be casually resurrected in a quasi-spiritual new age ceremony.
