Area 51: The Grail

Rating:
Summary: The Area 51 series stumbles but races ahead
Review: This fifth book in the Area 51 series keeps the series moving at a thrilling pace and kept my rapt attention from start to finish, but the storyline itself does show some frays around the edges. While a lot of things go on simultaneously in different parts of the globe, not a whole heck of a lot seems to happen overall. The newfound reliance of the heroes upon a book written over a hundred years ago serves to slow the story down and make it less believable, and I was disappointed to see a potentially shocking ending sabotaged by a somewhat familiar ruse--it is as if the author chickened out at the last minute from following through on a bold, brave idea. Of course, the addition of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Holy Grail to the storyline fuels the fire of my interests to solar proportions. Some readers may be somewhat disappointed because this book, even more than its predecessors, seems to focus on laying out the groundwork for what is to come later--while I myself was enthralled to see the mystery and complexity of the storyline wratcheted up even higher, some may expect to have a few answers rather than more and more questions by this point in the series. Certainly, everything looks set to explode in the next novel because all of the pieces now seem to be in place for the long hinted-at global conflict between humanity and the alien Airlia. So many questions have been posed so far, it may take at least two more books just to answer them all. If you've read this far into the series, you are in it for the long haul, and we can only hope that the author is able to eventually give us a conclusion worthy of all of this intense buildup. I am still excited about this series, intrigued by some of the little hints and clues that have been dropped along my path, and more than ready to dive into the sixth book.