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agrajag's review against another edition
1.0
This isn't entirely without merit, so giving it one star feels a bit harsh, but on the other hand Goodreads says that 2 stars means "It was OK", and nah, it really wasn't.
The characters here are caricatures, void of surprise and depth, and pretty much all of them are cliche. There's the square-jawed former-special-ops hero who seemingly by himself does more than the combined resources of CIA and FBI (and indeed rest of humanity!) are able to, the trophy girls who don't actually contribute anything of value, the ineffective opponents who somehow never manage to do anything at all and so on.
Worse, the plot is bullshit.
It starts like a classical mystery; leading men (mostly Americans, of course) start spontaneously burning to ashes in just a few seconds, and our hero is called in to investigate who is behind the immolations, and how they're done.
The answer? This happens because these people have a tiny alien spaceship in their head. The solution to this problem is to play a certain music to people, because the aliens (who look like spiders) are unable to tolerate that. There's no hint as to why that is, nor does the hero do anything sensible to figure it out; instead he asks a guy in an asylym who can (again; for reasons left entirely in the blue) "see" the aliens and somehow know that they go crazy from this music.
There's also a dog whose main talents are farting and unprovokedly licking things for no reason related to the plot -- yet which somehow STILL gets mentioned every time it happens, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the licking of arbitrary things to actually MEAN something, but it turns out to just be random noise.
Our hero and a side-kick then "take the fight" to the aliens by teleporting to the alien home-planet equipped with a rifle and a backpack each, they do this by sitting on a alien machine, and entering into it a number that they (again, entirely unprovoked) found on a paper-note on the floor. Really.
Luckily the aliens on the home-planet are (again for entirely unexplained reasons, are you noticing a pattern here?) human-sized and not lice-sized, so our heroes are able to shoot and kill around a dozen of the aliens. What this accomplishes is unclear, but they call it a success anyway, and the book ends.
There's also numerous mentions of God and Jesus and those folks, but those mentions also don't really connect to the plot in any way, other than in explaining how much of a Good Christian American our hero is.
The characters here are caricatures, void of surprise and depth, and pretty much all of them are cliche. There's the square-jawed former-special-ops hero who seemingly by himself does more than the combined resources of CIA and FBI (and indeed rest of humanity!) are able to, the trophy girls who don't actually contribute anything of value, the ineffective opponents who somehow never manage to do anything at all and so on.
Worse, the plot is bullshit.
It starts like a classical mystery; leading men (mostly Americans, of course) start spontaneously burning to ashes in just a few seconds, and our hero is called in to investigate who is behind the immolations, and how they're done.
The answer? This happens because these people have a tiny alien spaceship in their head. The solution to this problem is to play a certain music to people, because the aliens (who look like spiders) are unable to tolerate that. There's no hint as to why that is, nor does the hero do anything sensible to figure it out; instead he asks a guy in an asylym who can (again; for reasons left entirely in the blue) "see" the aliens and somehow know that they go crazy from this music.
There's also a dog whose main talents are farting and unprovokedly licking things for no reason related to the plot -- yet which somehow STILL gets mentioned every time it happens, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the licking of arbitrary things to actually MEAN something, but it turns out to just be random noise.
Our hero and a side-kick then "take the fight" to the aliens by teleporting to the alien home-planet equipped with a rifle and a backpack each, they do this by sitting on a alien machine, and entering into it a number that they (again, entirely unprovoked) found on a paper-note on the floor. Really.
Luckily the aliens on the home-planet are (again for entirely unexplained reasons, are you noticing a pattern here?) human-sized and not lice-sized, so our heroes are able to shoot and kill around a dozen of the aliens. What this accomplishes is unclear, but they call it a success anyway, and the book ends.
There's also numerous mentions of God and Jesus and those folks, but those mentions also don't really connect to the plot in any way, other than in explaining how much of a Good Christian American our hero is.
cj_jones's review against another edition
2.0
Caveat: I only read through 20% of the book. Things may change dramatically after that.
This is very much a Boys' Own Adventure sort of yarn, with the manly square jawed hero, a man of action, doing things while pretty ladies admire his boldness and his ineffective and morally corrupt enemies are helpless to stop him. And there are people who like that. This is a good book for them. Not so much for me.
Also, he writes in short sentences. Sometimes the sentences overlap. The detail is sometimes confusing. Here is an example. The commando team sneaks up to Qadaffi's palace fortress. They break in through the door. And Otto shuts the door. Yeah, Otto shutting the door gets a sentence. The state of the door will not later be a plot point. Weird.
This is very much a Boys' Own Adventure sort of yarn, with the manly square jawed hero, a man of action, doing things while pretty ladies admire his boldness and his ineffective and morally corrupt enemies are helpless to stop him. And there are people who like that. This is a good book for them. Not so much for me.
Also, he writes in short sentences. Sometimes the sentences overlap. The detail is sometimes confusing. Here is an example. The commando team sneaks up to Qadaffi's palace fortress. They break in through the door. And Otto shuts the door. Yeah, Otto shutting the door gets a sentence. The state of the door will not later be a plot point. Weird.
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