Rating: 
Summary: Not the Caleb Carr You've Read Before
Review: Readers enamored with Caleb Carr's vivid and murky turn of the century New York City as featured in "The Alienist" and "The Angel of Darkness" will be in for quite a disappointment here.Not only does he leave the city, but the century as well, setting his book in the internet driven world of 2023. Dr Gideon Wolfe, a historian, profiler, and psychiatrist (that's the only similarity to his other books), gets involved with a group of renegades who through technology have managed to manipulate people's perception of events historical, political, and even religious. One such "manipulation" sets of a sociopath bent on revenge that catapults the novel towards it's whimpering conclusion. The beginning of the book had originally been serialized for Time magazine, and it feels that way. Chapters at most are five pages long, and long passages of time in the story are acounted for in a sentence or two. Consequently the characters are about as exciting as melba toast with the most distinguishing characteristics being an accent or a facial scar. I found myself asking more than once, "Who cares?" I think even diehard sci-fi fans would have trouble with this one. Fans of his early work definitely will.
Rating:
Summary: waste of time
Review: I NEVER quit reading a book once I begin...but this one just didn't deserve any more of MY time after I read about 2/3 of it... I just wondered why I was reading this??? Poor character development, convoluted story line--in short, nothing to keep me as a reader. This author was evidently on his soap box about the evils of the internet and the unreliability of the news organizations. It was just asking too much to spend any more time with this lame story...I was suprised too, because I thought The Alienist was a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: Huh! What was the point of this book?
Review: Did I miss something? In the beginning I was intrigued by this book, wondering where it was going and what it was going to say. Well, I'm still wondering. Mr. Carr must have wanted to shake he reputation for writing stories set in the past really bad! Well he did get the last of that sentence right, really bad. There is no real point to this story. The writing is not bad and he does have a good beginning characterization. But, for the most part, the reader only gets a superficial look at the characters. The ending was dismal. Almost like the author say, "well that is enough pages, I need to end this thing '. I really hope that Mr. Carr doesn't plan on another one of these "future" books. Please Mr. Carr, go back to the 1800's. Those books are wonderful. You are at your best in that time. And please readers don't waste your time on this book. Let alone your money.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievably abysmal
Review: I still cannot work out how this book ever made it into print. Did Caleb Carr write most of this drivel while a teenager, & then find it many years later & submit it as a joke?Just as a warning to anyone who may be expecting originality and clear thinking, in this book you will find:
- a mysteriously stupid Virtuous Narrator
- a genetically-engineered Misguided Evil Genius
- his Beautiful Yet Deadly Twin Sister
- a really super-duper Rail Gun that blows things to little bits (yes, really)
- a Twist To The Plot in which the Misguided Evil Genius travels back in time, does some unspecified action at some unspecified time & causes the whole world to change, with, oddly, the exception of the immediate surroundings of the Virtuous Narrator. Add in lots of tedious moralizing about Information being different from Knowledge, delivered in truly awful leaden prose, and you've got a true stinker on your hands. Save your money. On no account buy this book for yourself, or anyone you like in the least.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Could Have Been Great, BUT...
Review: In the afterword, Carr thanks his agent for getting him this assignment. You got to be kidding, man. Who in their right mind would 'assign' somebody a novel? I blame the publishers for fumbling the ball on this one. The idea was great, but the follow-through was horrific. The publishers, if they had any guts, should have fired the writer and hired someone with real talent and imagination and story-telling ability. I would rather read John Grisham's interpretation of this idea. I would at least be entertained....
Rating:
Summary: Pedantic and Plodding
Review: I couldn't put "The Alienist" down; I liked "Angel of Darkness," though it moved slower--we knew who the killer was all along. But this? "Killing Time" is aptly titled. I felt I was killing time every attempt I made to read it. Half way through, I returned it to the library. Although I appreciated, even endorsed, Carr's concept of knowledge versus facts, I felt I was swallowing a pedantic sermonette from a bloated short story. The writing rarely moved me with the evocative narrative of his first books; in fact, I found certain details--or lack thereof--distracting. Carr is a gifted writer, particularly when he allows his characters to drive the story. In his previous books, I walked away with strong ideas that he had communicated through a genuine story. Here, his characters are props for a concept. An interesting concept, yes. The framework for cardboard characters, no.
Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: Having loved Caleb Carr's previous novels, "The Alienist" and "The Angel of Darkness," I picked up "Killing Time" with a sense of delighted anticipation. That anticipation, however, quickly disappeared as I plowed my way through this book. What I hoped would be an interesting look into the near future turned into a science-fiction doomsday hodgepodge, complete with references to the obligatory economic depression and the epidemics and the natural disasters that always seem to pop up in these sorts of books. Even more disconcertingly, much of the characters' dialogue could have been lifted from either of Carr's other novels, lending it a anachronistic air that jars violently with the storyline (and leads the reader to question how much Verne or Wells Carr read in his youth). While Carr does raise some interesting points about the pervasiveness of Internet technology, he does so in a pompous, "I am so far above the masses" manner that's exremely annoying. Science fiction fans not familiar with Carr's earlier work may enjoy "Killing Time", but Carr's fans just hope this is just a blip in the career of an otherwise talented novelist.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I have been a fan of Mr. Carr's efforts since the Alienist. I found his characters well developed and solidly believable within the period they were set. They worked well with each other. The stories moved toward plausible endings, cleanly, with intelligence. "Killing Time" is a literal waste of time. The plot is ridiculous, the characters outrageous. They are all arch types that would be tough to swallow one at a time. By putting them all into the same book I almost believe that Mr. Carr is playing a practical joke on his readers. The setting (near future - 2023) presumes that in 23 years the world has been lost to pollution, arbitrary acts of mass killing, a total loss of integrity, political manipulation on a global scale that is willing to destroy anything that gets in it's way. The tone and plot seem to have a lot in common with 19th century science fiction - Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" comes to mind, but more hostile, a lot less believable with no upside - no great positive vision. The final assault is the Audio book (unabridged) that is read by the author. Wow! How did the publisher allow this? Mr. Carr apparently has a slight speech impediment coupled with a lack of inflection that would undermine any story. OK, I'm done - I didn't like it. I would not recommend this "book" to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Dreadful.
Review: Utterly abysmal. Doc Savage novels have more literary sophistication and more believable characters. The book is dumb. For a successful author to cross over genres, and write such a stupid, insipid book shows more than laziness or ineptitude. It shows either contempt for the whole genre and its readers or a total lack of understanding. What's most upsetting is that the book purports to address two really big ideas: "Information is not knowledge" and "The world wants to be deceived." A science fiction novel that did address those ideas would have been great. In fact I've already dug as deep as the author does. In the hands of a Philip K. Dick, this could have been a fantastic book. In Caleb Carr's hands, it is just awful. For some reason, powerful enough lead them into extreme danger, but which bafflingly is never explained, a band of hoaxsters travel the globe spreading disinformation through the Internet generally and in many cases doctored video clips. Everyone believes their faulty information and fake video (even though it's 2023 and 30 years since Forrest Gump shook hands with JFK.) Then they decide they've gone to far and they have to catch someone who believed one of their hoaxes. Their amazing ship is powered by "super conducting magnets". It somehow uses magnetism to levitate above the earth and propel itself under the ocean. It masks itself with a "holographic projector". While being pursued and attacked by the most sophisticated weapons of advanced nations of the world, the ship is defended by a magnetic shield and the "rail gun", which uses magnetism to superaccelerate metal pellets. Early on, the hoaxsters shake the foundations of Christianity by "discovering" a new apocryphal gospel. That's stupid. There are dozens of apocryphal gospels in existence already. Further, if the actual behavior of men in the Church's name wasn't enough to cast doubts about its provenance, another apocryphal document probably won't work. The "discovery" of a 5 million-year-old human skeleton in Africa shakes the foundations of science. That's stupid too. In fact the scientific community recognizes that it is the scientific method itself that has proved most able to reconcile results in conflict with widely held theories. The presumable engine behind the action through the book is the search for a Mossad agent bent on detonating a nuclear bomb in Russia. Why is he so angry? He saw fake footage of Stalin visiting a working Nazi concentration camp. Why did this set him off? Of course much of his family had been killed in Nazi concentration camps. But this is 2023. Which means his parents and grand parents were not alive during the war, and his great-grandparents would probably have been to young too have children, so it was probably his great, great grandparents whose deaths he was avenging. Yet, inconceivably Germans don't face the brunt of his anger. And apparently the Mossad agent is ignorant of the long and sometimes violent history of anti-Semitism of Russia. I don't know what happens next, because I am abandoning the book with 100 pages to go. It is just that bad.
Rating:
Summary: read "The Alienist" but pass on this
Review: "The Alienist" is a fabulous book and I reccommend it to everyone. This one, however, isn't so great. Keep writing Mr. Carr, I can't wait till your next book.
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