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It’s only been about a week since I read this book, but I’m already hazy on the details, so this will be vague.
Basically, this super-rich guy hires an engineering firm with a perfect record of doing the “impossible” to extract a meteorite from the ground of a Chilean island off of Cape Horn. In the wintertime. Without Chile’s government officials finding out about it. Of course things go wrong.
This was an odd mixture of a book that I couldn’t put down and a book that felt like it was creeping along. I could have done without a lot of the day-to-day engineering feats they pulled off. They didn’t all add to the story’s plot.
I was pretty conflicted about who the bad guys and good guys were. This isn’t a very black-and-white book.
I saw where it was going. Overall, I think anyone who reads the back cover has a good idea what’s going to happen. But there’s a sudden twist in the very last sentence, and I even saw that coming from a little way out. Maybe because I’ve read both Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and Dan Brown’s Deception Point recently. In fairness, without those, I would have been clueless and maybe a little more weirded out.
And that brings up the fact that I couldn’t help comparing this book with Deception Point. The plots weren’t all that similar, but they do both involve unique meteorites. I would recommend Deception Point instead of this one. I read it much more quickly, heavy foreshadowing and all, and just overall enjoyed it more.
This book wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great. I’ve only read one other Preston/Child book, Thunderhead, and I would recommend it instead of this one too. I enjoyed it. I will keep reading these guys, though.
Reviewed December 21, 2008
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Friday Flashback Reviews are a weekly feature here on The Introverted Reader. These are old reviews I wrote on GoodReads. Thanks to Angieville and her Retro Friday Reviews for the inspiration and encouragement!
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