There's a chapter in The Count of Monte Christo in which a man faces ruin unless promised payments are received by the end of the month. As the chapter progresses things get more and more bleak for this man, there seems to be no way out of the ruin and debt he will face. Finally as the deadline approaches and despair has become so all encompassing for this poor man that the reader can't help but feel his utter desolation. His decision to kill himself and save his family the humiliation seems to be the only solution he can find. Until just at the last moment, Dantes' payments arrive.
It's a chapter so strangely thrilling, so affecting that it grabs you.
It's been twenty odd years since I read The Count of Monte Christo, and that chapter I still remember, it's incredible still to this day.
It most be a first in which this book by Preston and Child almost bests that chapter. The last 1/5 of this book is almost as gripping and involving.
Incredible.
Bring on the rest of their works. I think I'm going to enjoy them.

My precioussssss... on ice. (3.5 stars)

Just what I've come to expect from Preston and Child - non-stop, thrilling, and almost impossible to put down.

The characters were BORING, the plot was stolen (badly) from Jurassic Park, the ending was silly. I kept listening til the end and I'm upset with myself that I held out any hope it was going to get better.

Not my favorite Preston & Child book, but still good. This starts with a bang, then takes a long time to get rolling. It does pay off in the end, but there's so much to get through before that point. They've done much better with others, but still worth reading if you're a fan.

Mini-Review:

4.5 Stars for Narration by Scott Brick
1 Star for Plot
2.5 Stars for Characters

I enjoyed the Pendergast series enough to look for other work by the authors. The suspension of belief was impossible to keep during the story. It should have been interesting but it came off like a cheesy soap opera with little action. I'm not even sure why I finished it.

I love books by Preston and Child. Although I already knew what was going to happen in the end, because they have a certain predictability about them, I enjoyed how they arrived there. Some things I didn't anticipate happened, yet the story kept me engaged. Once again these two have crafted a crazy and believable story.

Okay, here's the thing: this book started out really freaking well. There's a lot of tension, and the idea of trying to retrieve a bigass meteorite from Tierra del Fuego is a good one. But then it takes a turn for the blurgh. This sucker is nearly 500 pages long, and it really only needed to be half of that. The characters aren't particularly interesting, and the few that DO have potentially interesting stories behind them are largely relegated to the sidelines.

By the time they started moving the meteorite I'd totally stopped caring about how they were going to do it or how the meteorite was killing people. The ending felt rushed and anticlimactic simultaneously, and I kind of wanted to throw the book across the room when I read the last line. But I restrained myself because I was at work.

Basically, this started out well and then took a trip to Airport Fiction Town.