December 1, 2015
Preston and Child take a break from their "Agent Pendergast" series to offer the fourth title featuring Gideon Crew. Featuring some of the characters that appeared in The Ice Limit, a stand-alone that the publisher will redistribute with a teaser chapter from the current book; with a 200,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 15, 2016
Effective Engineering Solutions' chief honcho, Eli Glinn, is out of his wheelchair, walking and ready for revenge after his agent Gideon Crew discovered a "restorative, health-giving lotus" on his last adventure (The Lost Island, 2014, etc.). Years ago, Glinn was nearly killed (thus the wheelchair) when his ship, the Rolvaag, sank two miles below the sea in the Hesperides Deep near the South Pole ice limit. The Rolvaag was transporting a 25,000 ton meteorite--"the largest meteorite in the world"--that EES had been paid to remove from nearby Isla Desolacion by billionaire Palmer Lloyd. Now Glinn has learned the sunken meteorite has begun to grow into a treelike form, nicknamed "the Baobab" because of its shape. Glinn believes it's an extraterrestrial life form, an alien seed that will destroy the Earth. He wants Crew to destroy it with a nuclear device. Thus begins relentless mayhem, another thrill-a-minute read. Piloting a Deep Submergence Vehicle, Crew snips a piece of Baobab. Aboard ship, the segment mutates into wormlike creatures that drill through the nasal passages and into the brains of sleeping crew, who thereafter run amok at Baobab's bidding. Series readers will see a new side of the enigmatic Glinn. Crew remains the standard angst-driven hero. There's the requisite slovenly, boorish, yet brilliant computer genius and a less memorable supporting cast. New readers will struggle with minimal references to EES's raison d'etre and its fabled Quantitative Behavior Analysis. There's diving lore, a precis on assembling a nuke, and a short, dense dissection of "endoplasmic reticulum" and "Golgi bodies" to conjecture a "carbon-hydrogen-silicon-oxygen form of life" that seems to have no purpose other than the biological imperative. Science fiction as action adventure, the sort of book primed for screen treatment if a producer can find a sufficient F/X budget.
COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
May 15, 2016
Eli Glinn, head of Effective Engineering Solutions, has planned to destroy a meteorite that he lost in a disastrous fashion off the coast of South America. Now the extraterrestrial rock, dubbed the Baobab, lies at the bottom of the oceannot a meteorite but a strange organism growing to gigantic proportion. Glinn enlists the help of Gideon Crew, a nuclear scientist and sometimes thief, to examine and destroy the Baobab before its growth affects the planet. What begins as an undersea technothriller evolves into a terrifying, action-packed, and gory deep-sea nightmare as Crew and others attempt to thwart a life-form that may be alien, machine, or a hybrid of both. Preston and Child set up the backstory effectively as Gideon questions survivors from the original disaster; and as expected, the authors treat readers with a cornucopia of real science, including exobiology, allelopathy, and panspermia theory. Fans have been clamoring for a sequel to the Ice Limit (2000) for quite some time, and incorporating the popular Gideon Crew to the mix will only add to patron demand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)
April 25, 2016
Preston and Child's exciting fourth Gideon Crew novel (after 2014's The Lost Island) satisfactorily resolves the cliffhanger with which they ended their 2000 thriller, The Ice Limit. Previously, eccentric billionaire Palmer Lloyd learned that the largest meteorite ever known had been found on an uninhabited island at the very tip of South America. The expedition he funded to retrieve it, under the leadership of Eli Glinn of Effective Engineering Solutions, ended with the sinking of the ship meant to bring the highly unusual meteorite back to New York City. Most of the expedition members perished, and the meteorite sank to the ocean floor. Six years later, Crew, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, agrees to accompany a second mission with the objective of destroying the thing with a nuke. That challenge is heightened when evidence emerges that it's actually a sentient alien. The bestselling authors maintain suspense throughout, and they throw in some original ideas that offset some familiar action tropes. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME.