Area 51: The Mission

Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: Enjoyed this a lot. Good book for a quiet day to get the mind going. Check it out.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best one yet!!!!!
Review: Having read the 2 prequels and The Rock I was expecting alot more and was sorely disappointed!The plot was just too complicated and I found myself 'lost' more than once.I had difficultly keeping up with who was who,The Watchers,Those that wait,Staar....aaaaahhhhhhh.It took me over a week to finish this book whereas it took me days to finish the other ones.I hope he does better with the next installment and finishes the series soon too!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent but recommend starting with first in the series
Review: I saw this book in the airport, bought, and read it on a flight overseas. Enjoyed it tremendously but wish I would have started with the first one in the series-- had to go back and get Area 51 and Area 51 The Reply. Ready for the next one to come out.

Rating:
Summary: The Mission? Predator vs The Hot Zone
Review: So many books beg to be read, and the Area 51 series shouts like a carny on the midway. You pays your money and takes your chances. Unfortunately, this story wandered into the Fun House and never got out. Bob Doherty slips from :The Reply into :The Mission without even a trip to the toilet. The audience is already defined as readers who survived the first two forays into this conspiracy maze, so why (oh, why!) does Doherty waste time and toner cartridges reviewing the trivia from novels 1 & 2? Imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien spent 50% of his trilogy pounding the reader with unnecessary references to the previous books. Bottom line, Bob: who cares? The Reply ended with loose threads and tried to weave into The Misson and missed the loom. Kelly Reynolds is STILL hugging the Guardian in Rapa Nui, and the mothership is still in orbit (now full of NASA trash) . . . c'mon Bob, clean up your messes! The whole Black Death scenario is pretty poorly plotted. We read The Hot Zone and know more about ebola than the CDC, but you feel obliged to slam us in the forehead with another dreadful "bug in the jungle" story. Now, if the satellite had whacked, say, Cleveland or Baghdad, this story would have taken off. Why bring the Nazis back to life anyway? Their fun in the sun is over. What makes the first two books exciting is the cat and mouse game with the Airlia. After the first part of The Mission, we never hear about Mars again. Dang! Why not power up the mothership and go and raise a serious ruckus on the Red Planet? This storyline is interesting and speculative, like all good conspiracy pieces, but it tries too hard to synthesize a comprehensive answer. I look forward to Area 51: The Apology

Rating:
Summary: A big disappointment for numerous reasons
Review: This book fell far short of my expectations in several areas. First, this is the third book in a series, and it is understandably difficult to accomodate both readers new to the material and those familiar with it, but this book fails dismally in the former case. While going into fairly detailed descriptions of things that should be familiar to most, like what an aircraft carrier is and how big it is, terms from the series like "foo fighter", "bouncer", and "talon" are used throughout the text with explanations coming late, if ever. Foo fighters are first mentioned on page 4, for example, but only in chapter 5 (p.61) are we told what they are. Another example of this is the use of the acronym NSA throughout the book - on page 180 we are suddenly told that NSA stands for National Security Agency, and on page 199 we are inexplicably given a history of that agency and its mission since the time of President Truman, almost as a parenthetical aside.

This kind of choppiness is a symptom of my second complaint, poor editing. The editing has more problems than that, though - details of names and locations mysteriously change over time. On page 254, two parties announce their radio callsigns as "Gallant" and "Sparrow", but on page 279 "Sparrow" begins talking to "Horseman"; the name has presumably been changed mid-stream to protect the innocent.

My third objection is to the liberties and inaccuracies taken with history. In any novel of this genre it is expected that history will be re-interpreted - Hogan did this brilliantly in "Inherit the Stars," his intro to the Ganymedan Giants series. But re-interpretation does not justify the inaccuracies and distortions in "Area 51: The Mission", and logical inconsistencies and self-contradiction are inexcusable. A brief history revision lesson (pp.138-145) tells us of the Empire of Axum, and states that "Axum was accepted by historians as one of the earliest empires in the world, founded around the first or second century before the birth of Christ." So much for Artaxerxes, Darius, and Alexander, and the empires of Persia, Babylon, and the Greeks, not to mention the Roman Empire which was in full swing at the same period. The next paragraph tells us that "Even long after Christianity came to Axum, the Queen of Sheba was reported to be a sun god worshipper... her visit with King Solomon was well recorded...." Come on! We're told that the empire was founded centuries before the birth of Christ, but Christianity came to them anyway, and that the Queen of Sheba, despite meeting with King Solomon (c. 950 BCE), is resisting Christianity 8 centuries later, centuries before Jesus is born! And it gets better - she met with Cing Ho from China in 656 BCE (p. 309). If we are supposed to deduce from all of this that the Queen of Sheba (and Axum) lived for 1,200 years or more, it would be nice to be told that explicitly instead of having to wade through this gibberish. There are more inconsistencies, but they relate to the plot, so I won't relate them here.

On the whole, this sad novel looks like a bunch of author's notes that were haphazardly slapped together and rushed to market. I hope that Dell and Robert Mayer, a/k/a Robert Doherty, will take more care with future works.

Rating:
Summary: "One of the best in the series, can't put down book!"
Review: If you like the first two books, you will love this one. The story kind of ends quikly but since there probably will be a part four, I strongly reccamend this to any scifi fans over the age of 14 for some strong language a little adult content and grafic content

Rating:
Summary: Kickass book
Review: The best sci-fi series of books I've read....and I have read alot

Rating:
Summary: A real disappointment for any Doherty a.k.a. Bob Mayer fan.
Review: I have been a HUGE Robert Doherty (a.k.a. Bob Mayer) fan for a number of years. I have read every book Bob Mayer has had published under all of his aliases including (Bob McGuire, Robert Doherty, Joe Dalton and Greg Donegan) and I will continue to read his books. However, Area 51: The Mission is not up to that standard of excellence that one associates with Bob Mayer. The Book starts off slow but then Bob makes a MAJOR, and I mean MAJOR, ERROR. The ERROR I'm talking about is that Bob takes the story line about the virus from another one of his books called 'Z', the series about a Green Beret named Riley (The Riley Series - A Great Series of 6 books). The virus part of the story is 90% verbatim from start of the virus to the discovery of the cure from the book 'Z'. If you are a Bob Mayer fan as I am, you will want to read this book, BUT, if you have read 'Z', then you have already read half of it. Bob must have been in a real rush or under a big deadline to not come up with something original. This book was a real let down for me as it will be for any of Bobs fans who has already read 'Z'. Incidentally, if you go to Bob's web site, the book 'Z' is the only one that is not available any more. 2 Thumbs down on Area 51: The Mission.

Rating:
Summary: This is really cool
Review: This book is fast passed and vary graphic but its one one the best I've read in a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Myths, legends, real places, archeology-- all woven together in a story that goes all over the globe. Good reading.