How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Not applicable
Advantages:
Story was pretty good and fairly fast - paced
Disadvantages:
No depth to characters, plot was flimsily held together, very predictable, no twists
Recommend to potential buyers:
no
Full review
I expected great things from this book, but unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations. Don’t get me wrong, it was a pretty good story, but that was overshadowed by the inconsistencies and the lack of depth. I also knew what was going to happen – it was a little obvious and I was left feeling a little disappointed that the twists I kept expecting to prove me wrong didn’t happen.
The story: Frannie, a widow, is a veterinary surgeon with her own small practice. Her husband, a doctor, was murdered a few years earlier. Since the murder, Frannie has lived in a small room at the surgery and her life changes when she rents her house to Kit who is actually Tom, and FBI agent. They have one thing in common; he also lost his family a few years earlier, his wife and two sons were killed in an aeroplane crash. He’s been working on a case for a few years but has been ordered off the case and told to go on holiday. (Why is it that FBI agents only seem to solve a case when they’ve been taken off a case?)
The story itself is a relatively common one. The greed shown by those with status and power: doctors, scientists, and a whole host of other high up people are working on creating the next step in the human evolution. The driving force behind the project is naturally very large sums of money and the need to be God. (So no surprise there then!) It comes down to the fact that these people are secretly testing on human beings with the cold-heartedness of a hungry lion. They steal babies from women, having told them that they died at birth. These are the same women who needed IVF in the first place, and obviously the top brass in that department is involved as well.
The hero and heroine, in this case Kit and Frannie manage to catch one of the children who escaped from the secret facility in the woods, and set out to expose the secrets of the inhumane treatment these kids have endured. I didn’t feel that any of the characters were built that well, with the one exception of Max, the little girl they find in the woods.
They can trust no one and of course, just about every character in the book turns out to be involved. It seemed quite silly that all these influential people, every kind of doctor from every possible department, every specialist, even down to a midwife practically, all lived in the same area, a few towns dotted around the woods containing the secret labs. And nobody seemed to link the fact that all these specialists were being murdered, and all knew each other or had worked with someone common to both. The whole story was held together in a really flimsy fashion.
The bad guys wiping out their own with cold-blooded calculation and determination so that they could sell their work to the highest bidder, in excess of 800 million dollars. However badly I felt the whole story hung together, it did keep you reading and was pretty fast paced. But I don’t think I’d recommend this one. I like a book with twists and turns that keep you guessing right to the end. I like to be able to almost believe that I’m there but apart from pretty good imagery of the test subjects within the (deserted?) labs there was nothing much special about this book.
It basically got to the point where someone you thought was a ‘good guy’ proved to be a bad guy (or gal) but nothing in the story tied these facts together and you found yourself wondering how that was possible.
I’ve heard James Patterson’s other work is much better than this, but I’m afraid I’ve been put off. So I would suggest that if you’ve never read this author before, you’d be better off trying a different book first.
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