Rating: 
Summary: Too much research, or not enough?
Review: Very fun read, all things considered - Even with the ripoffs of the Darwin Award stuff...
I also dig some of the techie stuff...
But sheesh - If you're gonna get technical about stuff, get your facts/language correct!
I'm into accuracy shooting - a bit more accurate than the Minor character, by the way...
Ferinstance, there's no such thing as a Winchester 748 cartridge - That's a Winchester powder - there's no way, short of massive scientific testing, that someone could tell what powder a cartridge is loaded with... And if you can tell that a pistol is chambered for a .40 cal bullet instead of a .356 bullet, without reading the markings on said pistol, you've got some darn sensitive eyes... Also, the .50 cal sniper rifles in the book, including the Barrett, are NOT illegal - not regulated either. Anyone with a few thousand bucks can buy one (but FWIW, as far as I understand, nobody's been running around shooting folks with 'em either...).
And you don't want to know how much 3,500 rounds of ammo for the things weighs... I think he'd need a bigger truck. And a buncha beer to bribe a few friends who don't mind heavy lifting...
I can understand the author maybe not being a gun nut, but dude, at least get someone to techproof the stuff...
Rating:
Summary: Worst Dan Simmons book so far.
Review: There are a few good things to say about this book. I liked the stuff about the Spartan way of life, and I liked the military details, but there were a lot of bad things as well.1. It's just a run-of-the-mill suspense book. No real suprises, plot is dull. 2. So much "borrowing" from the Darwin Awards. If you've ever read the Darwin Awards, about 30% of this book is filler. 3. Weird hypocricy at the end. Simmons invites you to laugh at the dead throughout the book, then at the end he berates you for it. It's as if he suddenly realized he had been being a jerk for 400 pages. Try some of his other books instead.
Rating: 
Summary: A Different Kind Of Thriller
Review: The hero of this novel is a man who makes his living investigating accidents; cars, airplanes, or whatever. The plot details his activities in investigating a series of accidents that have been deliberately staged in order to collect insurance. The bad guys are big monied people from the USA in business with the Russian Mafia. The author tells some fascinating tales of how accidents are analyzed, even to the mathematical formulae used. This is an unusual story because it uses so many different areas of typical thrillers; military, civilian, and police. This is my first Dan Simmons book; it won't be my last.
Rating: 
Summary: Contradictions galore: insurance thriller is not an oxymoron
Review: I won't say this is a faultless book- in fact, I will even list some of the faults for you. But it was pretty darn good. Now mind you, I ran across it by accident, while browsing some mysteries- although I read SF, I'm not a Simmons fan there, and I've never read Simmons' vampire stuff, even though I read vampire stuff. (So many books, so little time!!) So I'm approaching this in my capacity as a mystery reader, not as a Simmons reader. First off, it's got a nice sense of humor. Start with some of the chapter titles- they go in alphabetical order, e.g.: A is for Hole;
H is for Preparation;
I is for Witness;
T is for Sympathy and all the others. Then, there's a game that Lawrence and Trudy, the couple who run the insurance adjusting firm Darwin works for, play, involving car names - sort of a Car Carnelli. Winning a round has not only to do with getting a name that connects letter-wise with the previous car name, but also with the wimpiness rating of the car and the degree of unreality of the name. True, some of the humor is trite- if I've seen that collection of auto accident claims once ("I had been driving my car for forty years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident"), I've seen it a million times; but then, I happen to work for a state department of insurance so I see a lot more of that stuff than most people. There's a few really trite courtroom humor set pieces, too; what the heck, skim through 'em fast. There are a few jokes I haven't heard before, though, too. A warning: if you are not a real geek, you can skip about 2-1/2 pages where Dar not only explains a particular murder-disguised-as-accident to his lady friend, but shows her all the math equations involved in calculating the impact and trajectories of the vehicle and the victim. This is more math than I wanted to read, and I started college as a math and physics major; the number of people who would prefer to see all these equations in the middle of the text rather than a couple of sentences saying "He showed her the equations" is probably pret-ty darn small. What else do we have here? A pretty good car chase- it's hard to do a thrilling car chase in print, but this one works. The Russian mafia. The FBI. The LAPD. The NICB (that's the National Insurance Crime Bureau, for those of you who don't regularly work in insurance, and never before suspected that there could be an insurance thriller). Cops on the take. Crooked attorneys. LOTS of murders. My main pickiness about the novel: several characters are just a bit too good. I mean, Dar is not only an expert accident reconstructionist who used to work for the NTSB, he just happens to have been involved in the Challenger shuttle investigation, and before that, he got a Ph.D in physics, and before that, he was a marine sniper; he plays chess by email with 11 people simultaneously; he graduated from college at 18; he's a pilot and he sailplanes and he knows classical music and architecture and guns, is an expert at camoflage, and can quote huge chunks of Marcus Aurelius - I mean come ON, Simmons, isn't this a bit much? And then there's the female interest, an attorney/government investigator - who actually understands all the math and physics that Dar spews at her, and recognizes all his quotations, and knows all about guns herself, and so on and so on. As I said, a bit much. Have to suspend disbelief that people who do what these people do for a living also have time to be so perfect at so many outside interests. Quibble, quibble, quibble. All that said - it's a fast pace, a decent read, some funny, several good incidental side stories and sort of short-story mysteries contained within it. If Simmons decides to make this a series, I'll probably go ahead and order the second book, though I do wonder if he hasn't already used up most of the insurance humor in this one and is going to have to scrounge for it in the next one.
Rating: 
Summary: Simmons first failure
Review: Before Darwin's Blade I thought Dan Simmons could do no wrong regardless of the genre that he chose to write in. This one is a big disappointment. It never takes off, the story never gells. But what turned me off the most is Simmons' contempt for the reader, for anyone less of a genius than himself. His constant referring to his specific preferences of weapons, food, furnishings, anything wears thin quickly. The hero (presumably Simmons image of himself) is so much smarter than the rest of the mere mortals in this book. But instead of this working in a fun way like a James Bond type character I found myself wishing he would just be humbled, but knew there was no chance of this happening. Simmons needs to take a step backward.
Rating: 
Summary: A tedious pedestrian read.
Review: In the first quarter of the book I find I'm reading accidents that were published long ago on the net by "News of The Weird," and reading accident reports that were pulled right out of "Anguished English" by Richard Lederer or any cyberlist of auto insurance claims. *Yawwwwwnnnnn* Maybe it's me, maybe I'm simply disgusted with reading crime novels. But I don't think so. It's always the characters that make a crime novel good. This Dar character is a cypher; the only good character that I could picture and appreciate was Lawrence. This lack of a memorable main character is bad for a novel, any novel. I know Simmons tried to craft the main and supporting characters along the same formula used by many scifi authors writing scifi suspense novels with gee-whiz gyro-headed whizz-bang characters. But all these characters sadly gave me the impression of teeny-brained low-Qs. Indeed, it might have been more interesting if Simmons wrote up on the overall uselessness of NASA's bumptious MORT tree, especially as it pertained to the Challenger fiasco as a premise to a better more interesting novel.
Rating:
Summary: A Huge Disappointment to a Dan Simmons Fan
Review: Dan Simmons' novel, "Darwin's Blade" claims to be "A Novel of Suspense. Well, it's about as suspenseful as watching paint dry. I should state up front that I'm a big admirer of Dan Simmons' work. "Carrion Comfort" is a wonderful vampire novel and I thoroughly enjoyed his "Hyperion" books. That having been said, we move on to this misfire. It is clear that Simmons is trying to create a franchise for himself, staking out unexplored territory with a hero, Dr. Darwin Minor, who is an accident investigator. The book's dust jacket informs us that Simmons' brother is an accident investigator and he has clearly leaned heavily on him for research. Therein lies one of the major problems with the book. The research sticks out all over the place rather than being relegated to the background where it belongs. We are treated to endless conversations about speed coefficients and wind velocity, while precious little time is spent on plot or character development. The result is the kind of mind-numbing prose that follows, which I have lifted intact from page 319 of the book. "Dar had instinctively known, even as a young Marine sniper, that the wind's speed is only a small part of the equation. The wind direction must also be properly sensed and factored in. Any wind blowing at right angles to his direction of fire -- from eight -, nine-, ten- and two-, three-, four o'clock positions -- was a full-value wind. Any oblique wind -- one, five, seven, eleven o'clock -- would be accorded only half value, so a 7-mph breeze from his nine o'clock position would be rated as a 3.5 mph wind when he made his lateral adjustments to the scope. Finally, if the wind was blowing directly at his firing position or from the rear -- six or twelve o'clock -- Dar would factor in only minimal effect on the bullet; a slight drop in velocity firing into the wind; a corresponding rise in velocity with a tail wind." Had enough? I thought so. I would recommend "Darwin's Blade" only to those suffering from insomnia. Indeed, it took me twice as long to read this nonsense as it normally does for me to finish a book of similar length because I would read three or four pages and then start to drift off to sleep. We can only hope there will be no more Darwin Minor books. If there are, count me out.
Rating:
Summary: a little disappointing
Review: But if you're a Darwin's Award fan, it might be worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Buy the other Darwin Book
Review: I don't think that I've ever been this disappointed with a book before. Dan Simmons is a huge, enormous talent, and this book is simply below him. Another reviewer asked if it was a parody, but I think it is a flat-out joke. I think Mr. Simmons went to the Darwin Awards web-site, cribbed all of the content and strung it together with a barely cohesive narrative. It is an even greater shame that a book this mediocre would come from the same man who wrote the wonderful (and terrifying) Hyperion.
Rating:
Summary: Simmons is way off track
Review: I usually like Dan Simmons's work but this book is a disaster. It has uninteresting characters and events with the Russian Mafia angle being utterly cliched; even his writing style suffers here.Simmons should go back to the science fiction or horror genres;as a writer of realistic suspense, he flops.
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