With all the music listening and writing this week, I totally forgot to write about Book No. 33 of 2013, James Rollins The Eye of God. I have been a fan of Rollins’ Sigma Force novels since I read my first Map of Bones in 2005, and have enjoyed Rollins blending of science, history and of course a lot of action into 9 terrific reads!! It’s interesting as I write this that characters that first appeared in Map of Bones play a central part in this latest novel.
Like Harlan Coban’s Six Years this book is also a quest well actually it is several quests rolled into one action packed story. The most important quest is to find the satellite IoG2 which was studying dark energy surrounding a comet that is approaching the earth. While IOG2 (Eye of God) was preparing to perform and experiment evolving the transfer of dark energy back to its sister satellite IOG the satellite became unsteady and crashed to earth before its crashed pictures of the earth were transfer to the command center where Jada Shaw an astrophysicist whose theories of dark energy were being proven correct and Director of Sigma Force Painter Crowe were watching. The pictures showed a destroyed eastern coast of the US and more amazingly they were dated four days in the future!! So began Sigma Force’s quest was first to find the satellite whose final resting place was somewhere in Mongolia and then find out what the hell was going to happen and can it be stopped!!
Meanwhile in Italy those characters that previously appeared in Map of Bones Rachael Verona and her Uncle Vigor a priest were about top embark on their quest, which also involved saving the world, but involved another priest Father Josip a priest that Vigor thought was long dead. Josip sends Vigor a skull and the Book of Thomas bound in human skin. The message hidden in these artifacts was clean to Vigor and it pointed to the end of the Earth in FOUR DAYS. So they set off to find Father Josip and a quest which also involves Ghengis Kjan and Attila the Hun!! Mongolian, eh??
And finally former assassin Seichan now in a quasi-relationship with Sigma Force Commander Gray Pierce is on a quest to find Seichan’s long-lost mother. It is a quest that has taken them to the underworld of Macau, China. Only when the trio Seichan, Gray and Kowalski meet an informer who is going to tell Seichan about her mother turns out to be someone who wants to capture and sell Seichan (a large bounty is on her head due to her past) All hell busts loose and Seichan ends up in North Korea and Gray’s quest becomes her rescue!!
Ultimately, as you may have guessed all the quest come together and become a race to save the world from the destruction that was witnessed. The final resolution ties all the threads up in a whirlwind of action.
As always the characters are vividly drawn and while some characters are absent like Monk’s wife Kat and Lisa Painter’s love interest there are new members introduced including the aforementioned Jada Shaw and Duncan Wren who has magnets in his fingers that pick up minuscule oscillations and vibrate in the presence of an electromagnetic field!! and maybe in the presence of dark energy!!
So if you are like me and enjoy books that teach you stuff …. like Attila’s murder, and Genghis Khan’s mother’s birthplace and the quest for Genghis’ tomb, and blends that with cutting edge science and plenty of action, you’ll love The Eye of God… is it a little hard to follow and have a little too much happening maybe, is the action a little over the top with too many bodies, maybe. But the bottom line is that when you turn the last page… you learned something and had a great time doing it!!!
Here’s a cool trailer about the book! And if you’re already a fan of Rollins you can listen to an interview here