[rating=4]

If you go looking for this book, you’ll see three author names. Not entirely sure why amazon did this, but the other two are pen names for Bob Mayer. Probably because I think he reissued them under his own name, rather than the original pen name he used.

Anyway, I got the entire series as ebooks, because, mostly, they were cheap, and good enough at the price to be worthwhile. Not sure if I’d have done it if they’d all been paper. I probably wouldn’t have even started. But with the first book being 70p, I felt I had little to lose in at least trying them. As it went, I chomped my way through the entire six novels over the course of about 4 days or so.

There’ll be a few minor spoilers in the next coupld of paragraphs, but nothing major. And yes, I’m grading the series as a whole at the rating above.

First off, there isn’t a great deal of character development. You’re not going to really know the characters. On the other hand, there are enough that it’s not so glaring. People fall into roles that seem suited for them, so it doesn’t matter that they’re relatively one-dimensional. (Warrior that fights, though he doesn’t want to. Spy/mastermind that keeps secrets by habit.) It works well enough that it kept my interest. There’s also a degree of ‘so what’s the next bad thing that’ll happen’. I guess that’s kind of inevitable when you have a series. Some manage it with a little more finesse however.

As you might expect of a book with this name (and by extension the series), there’s a lot of myths built into this. Atlantis. The Bermuda Triangle (and all the other weird triangle places), crystal skulls, time travel (kinda), psychics, inter-dimensional travel and so on. It could have been a horrible mess. It wasn’t. It was neatly blended together, with a dash of particle physics and string theory, to give a fairly consistent whole. If you’ve read many of my reviews, you’ll probably have noted that consistency is a big thing for me. I’ll forgive a fair amount, if it’s at least internally consistent.

Is it a wonder of modern literature? No. Is it worth the time to read? If you read one book a year, no. If you read several a week, yes, I’d say so. Give the first book a chance (as an eBook) and go from there.