Mount Dragon

Rating:
Summary: Don't worry, it's not a Stand clone
Review: I am a big Preston/Child fan. When I saw the cover of this book, I hesitated and thought "Man, I hope this isn't a 90's version of King's "The Stand". After all that book was an epic tale but it took me like a year to read and I wasn't "up" for another run at the same thing. I'm happy to say that the only real similarity Mount Dragon has to The Stand is "the superflu", "Cap'n Tripps", "X-FLU", whatever you want to call it; a doomsday virus capable of wiping out the human race.

I'm not one to tell anyone any secrets so I'll just say this: This was a very well written book, It's an adventure that takes place in the New Mexico desert in a Genetic engineering lab. Yes, the main plot is working with a doomsday virus but there is much more to this story than that! It has high tech computer hacking, industrial espionage, history and legend, cat and mouse chases, and more plot twists than you can shake a test monkey at.

Honestly, I was very entertained by this book. It wasn't what I expected but that was a pleasant suprise. I constantly found myself hitting a major crisis and saying "how can this be happening? I still have XXX amount of pages left here." Not just once, but several times. The book always kept my interest and every time I thought I had the whole thing figured out, the authors threw in another twist.

If you like adventure, you'll enjoy this book. Solid writing and character development throughout, a good branching plot, excellent technical and scientific explanations, and the ending was well conceived and not rushed. Thumbs up on this one, not a 5 star (which I seldom give) but a strong 4.

Rating:
Summary: another winning thriller from the Preston-Child engine
Review: Just finished Mount Dragon (now into Thunderhead) and could not put it down.

These guys are good, I mean really good. They know how to create fully realized characters, in a believable setting, and then let all hell break loose.

Ever since I read Relic, I have been devouring their other stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Good page-turner.
Review: The biggest problem facing readers of popular fiction is that they can read faster than Clancy, Crichton, et al, can write. So they must turn to the second-team writers to fill in the gaps.
After reading this book, I'd say Preston and Child are adequate second-teamers. The story is a good techno-thriller and the characterization isn't bad. I plan to give other Preston/Child novels a try.
[For what it's worth, here's one thought that has occurred to me many times, and again on reading this book; is it possible to write a novel where the protagonist is male, and his co-worker or partner or person he runs into in the course of the story is female -- but she's NOT a babe? In other words, if I were to write a decent story, but I made the protagonist's partner a not-so-attractive woman with whom he doesn't develop a relationship -- would the story get published? Just wondering. The female partner in Mount Dragon is indeed a babe, so we don't find out the answer to my question here].