The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller Author: Visit Amazon's A.G. Riddle Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1940026016 | Format: EPUB
The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller Description
About the Author
A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting and running internet companies before retiring to focus on his true passion: writing fiction. He lives in Durham, North Carolina and would love to hear from you: AGRiddle.com
- Series: The Origin Mystery
- Paperback: 452 pages
- Publisher: Modern Mythology (April 5, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1940026016
- ISBN-13: 978-1940026015
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
"The Atlantis Gene" is the debut novel by A.G. Riddle. It's a Science Fiction thriller that combines elements of the lost city of Atlantis, human evolution, Nazis, conspiracy, alien technology, and end of the world scenarios.
The very basic premise (without spoiling anything) is that the human race was on the brink of extinction at one point in the past and somehow, for some unexplained reason, humans made a giant leap forward in the evolutionary ladder that allowed them to not only survive, but to take control of planet Earth. Dr. Kate Warner is a researcher and an expert on human evolution. She is living in Jakarta Indonesia studying and seeking a cure for autism. One day while working on a new treatment with a pair of her autistic children, hooded soldiers move in, ransack the facility, and steal the children. Shortly thereafter, agent David Vale shows up on the scene and he and Kate are sucked into a worldwide race against time to save not only themselves and the children, but quite possibly the whole world.
This book was recommended to me by a friend. He raved about it. Told me it was a "must read". After getting through the first half of the book, I found the story to be solid, but nothing necessarily different or special. As a matter of fact, I was a bit disappointed at how similar certain aspects of the plot were to Jeremy Robinson's "Second World" and James Rollins' "Black Order". And when I say similar, I really mean exactly the same. I even called my friend to tell him that I thought the book was average in every way and was a copy of these other books. I pressed on however and fortunately at about the halfway point, Riddle starts to separate his book from the others. The plot thickens, the characters start to develop, and the plot starts to turn.
OK, first I'm glad there is a forum for new authors, and every author has to write his/her first book. But please, at least have an editor look at it. Not to pick nits, but the spelling and grammar errors were irritating: one peeks at something, one doesn't peak; a chicken lays an egg, a person does not lay about. The anachronisms were irritating: there were no plastic sheets to cover things in 1917. "Branding" in those days meant burning a symbol on a cow. The concept of branding as creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers' mind is a 21st Century concept. And I think, but I'm not sure, that when a character is resurrected from 1917 and he doesn't know what a computer is, he probably would also not know what medical nanobots are.
Now, for more substantive issues. The hero was as dumb as a sack of rocks. I was hoping he at least had a plan when he and the heroine managed to infiltrate (actually, blunder into because the security guards were even dumber than a sack of rocks) the stronghold of the bad guys in China. I was hoping the plan would have some elegance and a bit of cleverness. But as near as I could figure, it consisted of him telling her, "You go find the kids. I'll set off a few diversionary explosions and look for a train to get us out of here." He then forgot all about the possibility of security cameras, so as fast as he planted explosives, the bad guys picked them up, and very quickly cornered him and shot him up. After a totally improbable escape, involving plague-ridden bodies on trains and monks knowing exactly which box car our gravely wounded hero and our heroine happen to be on, and . . . oh, never mind.
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