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austinstorm's review against another edition
1.0
Borrowed from Kindle Prime
Not my cuppa, unfortunately. I liked the Raymond Chandler style ("the rain fell like bullets" etc), but it didn't feel carried through consistently. The thriller follows a bunch of different characters, and without a clear protagonist I found it difficult to get invested.
Not my cuppa, unfortunately. I liked the Raymond Chandler style ("the rain fell like bullets" etc), but it didn't feel carried through consistently. The thriller follows a bunch of different characters, and without a clear protagonist I found it difficult to get invested.
krismoon's review against another edition
1.0
With this book, I teach myself the hard lesson that even though I might've read the book fast, it doesn't mean it was a good book.
Liquid Fear makes you turn the pages quickly, gobbling up the story and wanting the mystery to start to unravel. On that positive side, there has to be something said when someone can write like that. But having to get to the heart of the mystery through unnecessary, crude sex scenes and illusions to sex (that's most of the time not consensual aka: rape)... It's just deeply not my kind of book.
Liquid Fear makes you turn the pages quickly, gobbling up the story and wanting the mystery to start to unravel. On that positive side, there has to be something said when someone can write like that. But having to get to the heart of the mystery through unnecessary, crude sex scenes and illusions to sex (that's most of the time not consensual aka: rape)... It's just deeply not my kind of book.
cyan_ink's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
knallen's review against another edition
4.0
I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It was a nice medical thriller. There wasn't much mystery after the first quarter of the book, but there was plenty of suspense and action to keep me interested. The writing was good and the characters were fairly interesting. It wasn't necessarily a unique story, but it was a good one.
julesjae's review
2.0
I was not impressed with the ending! It was a complete let down and left the reader, me, not understanding the meaning of it. For me, it was as if the author didnt know how to end it and just did as quickly as possible. It was a good premise for a story which started out great and had high hopes.
ebgwa's review
4.0
Really really good. I can't wait to start Chronic Fear(picks up one year after the Monkey House trials). Fans of Micheal Crichton will like this a lot.
xterminal's review
4.0
Scott Nicholson, Liquid Fear (Thomas and Mercer, 2011)
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
I want to start off this review by trumpeting, SCOTT NICHOLSON IS BACK! The only problem with that is that Scott Nicholson never actually went much of anywhere; he just flew under the radar for a while, rocking his own mic by way of Haunted Computer Books, his self-publishing venture. Well, he's poked his head up aboveground again as one of the “new” kids on the block at Thomas and Mercer, Amazon's own mystery/thriller imprint, and if you're familiar with Nicholson, you should be rejoicing as much as I am that the guy has another shot at getting his books into stores across the nation.
If you're not familiar with Scott Nicholson, before telling you to take the plunge into Liquid Fear, the first in a projected series, I will tell you to go back to the beginning and check out a scary-ass little novel called The Red Church (viz. review 2Aug2004), originally publiched by Pinnacle in 2002 (currently in reprint via CreateSpace and available cheap-cheap in ebook form). That's a lotta novel, that is, and it is well worth reading. After that, Nicholson and Pinnacle parted ways, and while I'm sure there's all sorts of rational(-ized) explanations for that on both sides, it's pretty obvious one of the reasons is “they ain't gonna publish as fast as I'm gonna write.” Nicholson and Haunted Computer pretty much exploded in the decade since; the Scott Nicholson Library, in ebook form, is now up to vol. 4, plus a few other anthology-type releases. Scott Nicholson writes books like Merzbow makes noise—a lot of it, in a very short time span. Which brings us back to late 2011, Thomas and Mercer, and Liquid Fear. As I write this, book two, Chronic Fear, has also hit the streets, and if you want to know what the rest of this review will tell you in a nutshell, I'm planning on picking it up pretty quick.
Liquid Fear is genre thriller the way The Red Church is genre horror, and I do not mean that in any sort of pejorative sense. To the contrary, Nicholson understands very well what to do with the trappings of genre fiction in order to maximize value. This is a thriller that has two speeds, “full speed” and “lookout, Erma, we're gonna blow that turn!”, a sufficiently creepy villain, protagonists who are far too clueless for their own good (and a reasonable enough explanation for their cluelessness so we're not sitting here yelling “no, don't open the door, you idiot!” at the book every five minutes), a hitman with ambition, shady government and religious officials, you name it, all of which lives in service to a tight plot that neither asks too much of the reader nor asks too much to strain the reader's credibility. This can be a fine line to walk, at least jusging by some of my recent forays into the genre, but Nicholson treads it like a Wallenda on crystal meth. Comparatively, the book's problems are minor, and also fall within the usual trappings of genre (some purple prose, some characters who aren't quite as developed as would be nice, etc.). The upside to this is that if you're looking for a genre thriller, you will likely be expecting them all, and so they won't detract too much from the experience. This one's a lot of fun, and worth your time if you're a thriller fan. *** ½
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
I want to start off this review by trumpeting, SCOTT NICHOLSON IS BACK! The only problem with that is that Scott Nicholson never actually went much of anywhere; he just flew under the radar for a while, rocking his own mic by way of Haunted Computer Books, his self-publishing venture. Well, he's poked his head up aboveground again as one of the “new” kids on the block at Thomas and Mercer, Amazon's own mystery/thriller imprint, and if you're familiar with Nicholson, you should be rejoicing as much as I am that the guy has another shot at getting his books into stores across the nation.
If you're not familiar with Scott Nicholson, before telling you to take the plunge into Liquid Fear, the first in a projected series, I will tell you to go back to the beginning and check out a scary-ass little novel called The Red Church (viz. review 2Aug2004), originally publiched by Pinnacle in 2002 (currently in reprint via CreateSpace and available cheap-cheap in ebook form). That's a lotta novel, that is, and it is well worth reading. After that, Nicholson and Pinnacle parted ways, and while I'm sure there's all sorts of rational(-ized) explanations for that on both sides, it's pretty obvious one of the reasons is “they ain't gonna publish as fast as I'm gonna write.” Nicholson and Haunted Computer pretty much exploded in the decade since; the Scott Nicholson Library, in ebook form, is now up to vol. 4, plus a few other anthology-type releases. Scott Nicholson writes books like Merzbow makes noise—a lot of it, in a very short time span. Which brings us back to late 2011, Thomas and Mercer, and Liquid Fear. As I write this, book two, Chronic Fear, has also hit the streets, and if you want to know what the rest of this review will tell you in a nutshell, I'm planning on picking it up pretty quick.
Liquid Fear is genre thriller the way The Red Church is genre horror, and I do not mean that in any sort of pejorative sense. To the contrary, Nicholson understands very well what to do with the trappings of genre fiction in order to maximize value. This is a thriller that has two speeds, “full speed” and “lookout, Erma, we're gonna blow that turn!”, a sufficiently creepy villain, protagonists who are far too clueless for their own good (and a reasonable enough explanation for their cluelessness so we're not sitting here yelling “no, don't open the door, you idiot!” at the book every five minutes), a hitman with ambition, shady government and religious officials, you name it, all of which lives in service to a tight plot that neither asks too much of the reader nor asks too much to strain the reader's credibility. This can be a fine line to walk, at least jusging by some of my recent forays into the genre, but Nicholson treads it like a Wallenda on crystal meth. Comparatively, the book's problems are minor, and also fall within the usual trappings of genre (some purple prose, some characters who aren't quite as developed as would be nice, etc.). The upside to this is that if you're looking for a genre thriller, you will likely be expecting them all, and so they won't detract too much from the experience. This one's a lot of fun, and worth your time if you're a thriller fan. *** ½
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