Reviews :: Book Genre :: Thriller :: Page 2

Been a long time! Miss me? Of course you did, what a stupid question. Well a new Larry Correia book is out and you couldn’t expect me to pass up an opportunity to read/review it now could you? Another stupid question – I’m Correia’s biggest fan. But, of all Larry’s books DEAD SIX (EBR Review) has probably been the one I’ve liked the least. That’s not to say that DEAD SIX is a bad book, but I didn’t consider it up to Larry’s standards. It was fun and action-packed but the writing was a little rough around the edges, the collaboration between Correia and Kupari wasn’t seamless, I wasn’t sold on the characters, and I couldn’t find any merit in either of the romantic relationships. That said, I wasn’t discounting the series as the second half of the novel runs a whole lot smoother than the first. I’m quite pleased to say that SWORDS OF EXODUS by Larry Correia and Mike Kupari (Amazon) is infinitely better.
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IN THUNDER FORGED (Amazon) is the first novel set in the Warmachine world, which is known for tabletop war games, and several RPG releases. Created by Privateer Press, and published by Pyr SF&F, the novel takes place in a war-torn, steam-powered fantasy world, and IN THUNDER FORGED is a strange breed of Military Thriller, Espionage and Heroic Fantasy. I’ve been playing the tabletop game for several years now, and I’m (what I consider) pretty familiar with the world and setting. A series of tie in novels was not something I approached without trepidation. I’ve never read an Ari Marmell book before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
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I’ve been suffering a bit of a reading slump of late. I’ve got plenty of awesome material to pick from and a complete and utter lack of motivation to read. Maybe it’s the summer heat? Regardless, NEXUS by Ramez Naam (Amazon) has shattered that lethargy and cleansed it in napalm. Optioned for a film by Paramount and Darren Aronofsky, NEXUS is probably the best book of 2012 that I’ve read in 2013. It’s a perfect summer beach read, a stimulating near-future thriller loaded with equal amounts action and speculation. NEXUS offers human characters, real (scary) science, and deep ethical dilemmas. This fiction debut is the contemporary evolution of cyberpunk: the future isn’t about virtual reality but augmented reality. Pardon my drooling, I had a blast reading this.
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REAMDE (Amazon) is the second Neal Stephenson novel I have read, the first being the all time geek classic SNOWCRASH (Amazon). Unlike SNOWCRASH and, from what I understand, the majority of Stephenson’s other works, REAMDE is a pretty contemporary affair. Fans of irreverent, pop-culture laden science fiction will be disappointed in no small degree. Those looking for a fast paced thriller, on the other hand, may want to give REAMDE a chance.
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Admit it. Once upon a time you read Tom Clancy too. There’s no shame in that admission. Clancy had some awesome stuff…you know, before he just seemed to lose his touch. CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. WITHOUT REMORSE. Yeah. Awesome. But here’s the thing, there came a point where the story took a back seat to Clancy showing off how much he knew about the technical aspects of everything military related. If you go on for a full chapter talking about how a bullet works, and then don’t do anything with that chunk of pages, you’re doing it wrong in my opinion. It’s about the story. It’s about the characters.

Tom Clancy went away well before he wrote TEETH OF THE TIGER (I still shudder), and there wasn’t really anyone who captured my imagination the same way.

This is the part where a lesser reviewer would say, “Until now!” I refuse to say that.
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Hypothetical situation for you. You live in the US, and one day you get a phone call from a doctor that tells you your father has just suffered two major heart attacks, possibly received some brain damage as a result, and that he has consequently sunk into a deep coma. Naturally you rush to his bedside, forget about your life entirely, and fret over every blink and shift until finally, several weeks later, he wakes up. When he does, he starts rambling about how he’s traveled forty years into the future to a little village in South America where he made enemies with some bad ghosties, and that he needs to get back there to figure things out. Then he leaps out of the bed, grabs the lamp, and proceeds to smash it into the wall, stating that one of the ghosties has come to get him. Again, naturally, the doctors at the hospital throw him in the psych ward.

What do you do?
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Sometimes, no matter how much you like an author, their latest book ends up being a disappointment. NEUROPATH by R. Scott Bakker (Amazon), fit that description for us. As you all well know, we love his Prince of Nothing series. NEUROPATH is Bakker’s attempt to put his spin on the thriller genre.

It is evident within the first 20 pages (probably less to most people) that Neuropath is written with a very strong bias and moral (if there is such a thing… dun dun DUN) bent. This book, while a mystery/thriller, is not the typical fare in the genre. There are lengthy discourses about free will vs. determinism, what free-will is exactly, identity issues, and the possibilities of contemporary neuroscience.
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I read and loved, with certain reservations, Orson Scott Card’s EMPIRE (Amazon). So when I found out there was a sequel pending for imminent release I was excited to see how the franchise was handled.

If you haven’t read EMPIRE, here’s a quick rundown. The possibility of a civil war, in America today, becomes very real when the President and all his staff are assassinated. Reuben and Cole become pawns in a conspiracy to an American revolution. The ending leaves us with a Princeton professor leading both the Democratic and Republican parties, and taking the office of the President with more than just a few suspicious events to those with a keen eye (Read: The main characters) in his resume.
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Have you ever had that burning sensation in your chest? No, not heart-burn. More deadly (if possible) than that. We mean the feeling when you are reading a novel, watching a movie, or playing a video game and you get SO impatient for it to move along. You start clenching your jaw. You crack your knuckles again, even though you just cracked them two minutes earlier. And the feeling that is the perfect mix of annoyance and impatience burns in you. That’s what reading THE LOST SYMBOL is like. It is excruciating. Yes. Excruciating…that is the word of choice to explain Dan Brown’s latest “novel.” (Dear Dan Brown: Thank you for kindly putting the words, “A Novel” on the front cover of your book. Without them, we would have mistaken this book for a slush-pile reject.)

What a terrible, terrible book.
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Read on for our completely incredible opinions on THE CITY AND THE CITY by China Miéville (Amazon).

China Miéville is an author who doesn’t settle for one genre. He has sampled many, many different genres, and somehow manages to give them each a unique creative style all their own. While many might argue what genre to lock Mr. Miéville in, we at Elitist Book Reviews think he is nearly as awesome as we are and doesn’t need to be bound to a single style.

While THE CITY AND THE CITY is a fairly large departure from his previous works, Mieville blends the familiar and the unknown together to create a believable mystery. The protagonist, Tyador Borlú, loves his city and country of Beszel, and works there as a police inspector.
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