Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant Novel; Enthralling
Review: When man first descended from the trees and walked upright, his average speed was 4 miles an hour. In 1800, a man on a horse could travel 10 miles an hour. Then, between 1815 and 1850, the steam engine and the train catapulted the average speed to 40 miles an hour, with a maximum speed of 70 miles an hour. Today, we find such speeds common place. But at the time, all was a complete mystery to ordinary people. For example, falling from a moving train was not generally understood to be fatal. people assumed that falling from a train was much like falling from a horse--it all depended on how you landed.Crichton artfully weaves this type of historical perspective inot a riveting story about the greatest train robbery of all time--which never would have been tried had they understood what they were doing. But in this case, ignorance was bliss, and it worked, against all odds. Not the Crichton you may be expecting...there is science, but it is the science of the 1800's; no cutting edge technology, unless you consider the invention of wax to make keys new technology--which it was; no exotic locales. Instead, Crichton takes us back to England in the 1850's--at the end of the Crimean War, and less than a decade before the U.S. Civil War, and during the hey day of mass industrialization. Crichton does an excellent job of setting the stage and reminding us just where the roots of our current urban society lie, and just how recently those roots were first sunk into the rural past. Having set the stage, Crichton weaves the history with a great crime novel. Taking advantage of wealth, social stratification, and even advanced technology (for the time), Crichton follows a criminal mastermind in his year long plot to steal 12 million pounds sterling, supposed to be used to pay French soldiers fighting Russia in the Crimean war. Trains and safes had both just made their appearances. Fingerprints, combination locks, and explosives were still on the horizon. Breaking into a safe on a moving train was a then unthought of crime. Of course, they were caught--Crichton lets us know right at the beginning that his source is the trial transcripts--but the ways, whys, and means are wholly unpredictable, and will keep you turning the pages right to the very end.
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