Rating: WARTY!
This novel struck me as strange from the outset. Obviously (and especially as judged by the cover) this is very much intended to be in the mold of a James Bond spy thriller, but it really has nothing to do with James Bond. It has a lot more to do with the special ops genre of stories, such as Mission Impossible, for example, with small teams going in under the radar to accomplish a goal.
The novel itself is written in a very breathless style, almost like fan fiction, which was hard for me to stomach. Some of the expressions used seemed really odd, and some of the descriptions were off. For example, Arlington cemetery isn't known for its trees, and willow trees aren't known for emulating umbrellas, so describing a funeral there which has willow trees forming huge umbrellas over the mourners seemed inauthentic to me. It felt like the authors often used a word too many in describing things, too. It's hard to explain that, but the descriptions often made me say, "What?" and brought me to a halt while I went back and re-read it to figure out if it made any sense.
In other instance, the words were not gainfully employed, such as when the authors used the term, "She walked into a side nave" when it should have been, "She walked into a transept." It was things like this which kept taking me out of the story, but perhaps other readers will not notice or not care about things like this, so here's an example of the writing style which felt off to me. This is one complete section of text with nothing removed or changed, so you can judge for yourself:
The car lurched forward and propelled her onto the narrow street without making as much as a sound.
She maneuvered through an upslope alley, being spit out onto the main square on top of the mountain. She closed distance with Olga's Mercedes, as she sped the Porsche Boxter downhill. The city walls rushed past her. She banked right, taking the road over the bridge. The river rumbled a hundred meters below as the three cars reached the other side.
Tanya led them in a wide circle around the city. The yellow blades of dry grass rushed past her. Cars and cyclists stopped in laybys to take in the sunset, oblivious to the chase.
Apart from misspelling 'Boxster', this description just sounded odd to me. Note, to begin with, that this is not a car chase, James Bond style. It's merely a vehicle tailing two other vehicles to a restaurant. Why it was written in such a melodramatic fashion is a complete mystery to me. And the wording is too much. For example, while banking (in this sense) is an aeronautical term, you can describe a motorbike as banking around a corner, but not a car. Then we had "The city walls rushed past her...The yellow blades of dry grass rushed past her." It was too much to take seriously for me - not all in one small section of text.
This kind of thing struck me as strange given what the blurb says: that the authors are scientists and have engineered every sentence. Say what? What does that even mean? It certainly didn't feel to me like any 'sentence engineering' was undertaken unless what's meant by that is injecting gratuitous Adrenalin into passages which require none. That entire section could have been reduced to a couple of sentences indicating that car C tailed cars A and B to the restaurant; nothing would have been lost, and I would have enjoyed it a lot better.
Science and engineering are two different disciplines, and while they do have many points of overlap, they're not the same thing. Why a scientist would be better at 'engineering' a sentence than a professional writer would be, escapes me. Scientists are often the worst at writing novels because of the fact that they're trained in writing scientific papers, and the two approaches are not the same.
Initially I had guessed that the writers were French, and writing in English, but I was wrong. Karner is Austrian and Acquah is from Ghana; however, if they wrote this directly in English, it might explain some of the wording. One thing I noticed here was that they don't use contractions in this volume, so the English is rather stilted with everyone saying "I am" and "I have" instead of "I'm" and "I've", and so on. This is odd because in the brief introductory (so-called) volume I reviewed, they did use such contractions. I don't know why that changed.
Right after the section form which I took the above quote, the people who were tailed entered a restaurant. For some reason which isn't explained, the person tailing them cannot enter the restaurant. Not that there's any reason to. What they want to do is conduct surveillance using a small drone, but instead of getting on with it and running the surveillance from the car right there in the parking lot, which would have been perfectly fine, they quite literally invade an occupied home across the street, barging in and taking over the house to conduct their surveillance from there. It's completely absurd and hardly the best way to undertake clandestine surveillance unless you want to cause an uproar and direct your subject's attention to your activities!
The worst part about this is that they apparently intended to assassinate someone. A bullet was fired that evidently entered someone's head, but I could not figure out who it was who was killed! I was certainly neither of the two people they'd been initially tailing. So they invade someone's home to kill someone across the valley and then they leave the witnesses (the people whose home they just invaded) alive? Again, it was nonsensical.
It was at this point, 30% in, that I really decided I didn't want to read any more, but because the novel was so short, I decided I would go to 50% and if there was no sign of improvement, terminate it there. I'm not one of these people who believes in wasting my time reading an un-entertaining novel when there are so many more and better ones waiting for me to get to.
Another issue I had was not with the writing, but with the crappy Kindle app I use to read novels on my phone. Note that this was not an advance review copy, but a published copy, so it should have been ready for prime time. I have my Kindle app set to a black screen with white text, but in this novel, random words, sentences, and entire paragraphs were in reverse colors: a white background with black text. Sometimes the reverse text would even begin in the middle of a word. I have no idea why, and there seemed to be no pattern to it. The effect was the same in the Kindle app on an iPad, too.
I did not encounter this problem with the introductory volume, but I have encountered numerous issues with the Kindle conversion process in general and while there are things authors can do to minimize issues, these tend to be very restrictive things which step on authorial creativity. The bottom line is that this is simply Amazon's way of saying, "Screw you! We don't care! We don't have to care: we're Amazon!" It's really annoying, but this really had nothing to do with the authorship itself.
Finally to the plot! The basic story consists of a small team of people wo are supposedly spies. None of these people had any sort of a real introduction in this volume. They remained flat and uninteresting. I really didn't care what happened to them or whether they succeeded or failed in whatever it was they were doing at any given moment. There was no sense of tension or possibility of failure.
I had thought that perhaps the earlier volume took care of this, but it did not, so the characters are completely flat and have zero history, and thus were uninteresting to me. They were what they did and nothing more. Antoine is apparently the leader, and he is employed by an international agency located in Vienna. On his team are an ex-MI5 agent, although how someone who isn't a British citizen would ever have been an MI5 agent isn't explained. Perhaps 'from Ghana' means he was based there, not born there. Additionally there is a hacker from India, and a so-called 'Lord of War' (whatever that means - I think it means arms dealer) from Pakistan, who are evidently an item, and for reasons unknown, this seems to be a problem.
I don't get how these people can be successful spies. Not one of them has any real training in espionage. They're essentially nothing more than murders. The obligatory 'hacker' is a joke in stories these days, and this one, Priya, turned out to be far less interesting than I'd hoped she'd be. She did no hacking at all in the part I managed to read. There's another character named Mini, but she played such a small role that she may as well not have been there.
I was initially attracted by the international flavor of the team, as improbable as it sounded in the blurb, but this really contributed nothing to the story. These people could have been anyone of any gender and any nationality, and the story would have been the same. This cosmopolitan flavor had made me think, originally, that this novel would make a pleasant change from the usual white men only (with a 'babe' thrown in for sexuality) club, which is what Mission Impossible largely is, but it didn't.
This team has to contend with stolen Chinese stealth technology and a dirty bomb, although the authors seem to be confusing 'dirty bomb' with 'neutron bomb' or perhaps even with a regular nuclear bomb. Dirty bombs are not intended to be hugely destructive in terms of blowing things apart. Dirty bombs are intended to contaminate large areas to render them useless and quarantined. A neutron bomb does something similar, but the intention there is to kill large numbers of people while leaving infrastructure intact. I'm not sure what the real purpose was supposed to be here.
Anyway, I reached fifty percent and things did not improve. They actually became worse, and I honestly could not bear to read any more, so I quit this at the end of chapter ten. There is something wrong, and off about the writing as I've indicated. Overall, it just grates. There was another example where some hacker has evidently brought down firewalls in multiple systems Mafia-boy style, including, we're expected to believe, the CIA. The team decides to use this as a means of investigating three people they are tracking. Despite the fact that firewalls are down, we're expected to believe that in order to get into the CIA's database, Priya will have to infiltrate an NSA facility and log-in to the system from the inside. In that case, what does it matter that the firewall is down? They could have done that at any time. None of this made any sense.
So Priya gets into this high security building by lifting the ID card of one of the janitors. This bald assumption that all janitors are trusted anywhere inside an NSA facility simply isn't credible. Neither is it credible that there would be no security worth a damn, and no night-shift at an NSA facility! The funny thing is that this isn't the biggest problem here. Even if we buy this scenario, why do they put it off until that night? It's simply not credible that a firewall breach at a CIA or NSA facility would be left hanging in the wind throughout the course of a whole day. By the time these people had got in there that night, the breach would have been long sealed, or at the very least, the affected computers removed from the network entirely. It's simply not remotely believable, and this merely served to confirm the feeling I'd had at around the 30% mark, that I could find better things to read with my time.
I honestly can't recommend this novel in good faith as a worthy read, but I wish the authors all the best.
