Review: AREA 7, Matthew Reilly

Audio CD edition published 2003 by Bolinda Audio, ISBN 1-74094-412-7. 11 CDs approximately 13 hours, read by Sean Mangan.
Novel published by Pan Macmillan Australia 2001.

Area 7 is a secret Air Force installation deep in the Utah desert, near Lake Powell. Today it is being visited by the President of the United States, but the scenario awaiting him is almost unimaginable, evil of gigantic proportions, treachery on a giant scale.

Accompanying the President is his own security squad and his helicopter crew. Just as well for the President that it contains Captain Shane Schofield, because without him the President would have been easy meat for the rogue Airforce unit waiting for him.

The amazing thing about the action of this story is that it all takes place in such a short time. It is pacy, rough, violent, but at the same time as your mind is trying to unravel the mystery, you are busy imagining the setting, and visualising the challenges. The action itself has a lot in common with the earlier book I listened to SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS, written late (2005). You can see Reilly honing his graphic descriptive skills. I particularly enjoyed the Utah desert and Lake Powell descriptions as I visited there about 15 years ago.

AREA 7 is really a thriller, at the edge of my usual crime fiction reading. There were bits that I didn't really enjoy, (particularly the blood, guts and brains bits) but I guess that is the same in any novel. The plot kept me going though. There were times when I wondered whether Shane Schofield and his team would live to fight another day, but then the cynic in me said they would, because there is a "sequel" called SCARECROW (2005). AREA 7 itself is a sequel to ICE STATION (1999), which I haven't read. However in ICE STATION Reilly killed off one of his primary characters, as he does in AREA 7.

It feels like I have been listening to this forever, certainly two library renewals have happened. I followed hot on the heels of listening to SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS. I really have listened to enough Matthew Reilly just for now, but I certainly won't be averse to another, perhaps the first Shane Schofield ICE STATION.

My rating: 4.4

Review: SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS, Matthew Reilly

Unabridged audio, Bolinda Publishing, 12 hours 15 minutes on 11 CDs. ISBN 1-74093-885-2. Read by Sean Mangan.

Originally published in 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia.

I wasn't at all sure that I would like this book. A thriller in the Indiana Jones mode rather than my usual crime fiction diet, and I was a bit daunted by the length of time I would have to listen. At 15-20 minutes a journey, I calculated it would take me at least a month of travelling to and from work.

The story quickly: At one time, the Great Pyramid at Giza had a golden capstone with remarkable powers. And then it was broken into seven pieces and hidden for over 4,000 years. Each of the pieces is located with one of the lost seven ancient wonders of the world. The cataclysm that the capstone was originally created to prevent is about to happen again, and teams of ruthless men race around the world trying to find and take possession of the seven pieces, so becoming the most powerful men in the world. The only clues are some ancient documents written in an almost untranslatable language, which only a child can read. The hiding places are booby trapped, created by one of Egypt's cleverest builders. The nation that retrieves and replaces the capstone on the Great Pyramid will, according to legend, rule for 1,000 years.

So, did I enjoy this? Well yes I did! The start was a bit gruesome and it did take a CD or two to work out what was going on. But then I found myself worried if the team of Jack West Jr., an Australian leading a small team with minimal resources, representing the 'small nations', was going to succeed or fail in preventing the US or European teams from gaining the power.

It did rather feel as if I was inside a Dungeons and Dragons game, or at the very least on the set of a Harrison Ford movie. But Sean Mangan's reading is first class. A measure of my enjoyment: tonight I borrowed AREA7, again by Matthew Reilly, and again read by Sean Mangan, to listen to in the car. 11 Cds, 13 hours 6 minutes. I'm a Matthew Reilly convert, at least in this format.

My rating: 4.6

The novels of Matthew Reilly - courtesy Wikipedia

Stand alone novels

• 1996 Contest (Self-published in 1996; published by Pan Macmillan in 2000)
• 1999 Temple (appears to be set in the same universe as Reilly's other novels, is referred to in passing in both Area 7 and Scarecrow.
  

The Shane Schofield series

• 1998 Ice Station
• 2001 Area 7
• 2003 Scarecrow
• 2005 Hell Island (Novella which was an Australian "Books Alive" exclusive; reworked version for people with reading difficulties, released for the "Quick Reads" program in UK
  

The Jack West Jr series

• 2005 Seven Ancient Wonders (Also known as Seven Deadly Wonders in the U.S.)
• 2007 The Six Sacred Stones (Sequel to Seven Ancient Wonders)
• 2009 The Five Greatest Warriors (Continuation of The Six Sacred Stones)(According to Reilly it will be released in October 2009)

Progress reports - various books

I have been "reading" 3 books recently and am not likely to finish any of them this side of Christmas so my post today is a progress report.

I've been faithfully reading Alexander McCall Smith's online novel CORDUROY MANSIONS for 14 weeks now. There are 6 weeks to go.
Today the Telegraph has changed the way you access the book, particularly the audio part. The result is that, rather inconveniently, the widget that I have running on Crime Fiction Journeys now takes you to the home page of the Telegraph, not to the exact page of the chapter you've chosen. So then you have to locate the link to CORDUROY MANSIONS. Once you get there, they have changed the chapter layout, and it is not easy to locate the audio file you've gone there to listen to. Grrr..
The book (or rather Alexander himself we are told) is taking a 2 week break and will resume on January 5. I hope they've reinstated the old system by then.
Am I enjoying the book? As I've commented before I'm enjoying listeningto Andrew Sachs reading each chapter, but I'm not quite sure where the book is heading. You'd think that, 2/3 of the way through, I'd have more idea wouldn't you?

For the last week I've been listening to Matthew Reilly's SEVEN ANCIENT WONDERS in the car to and from work. There are 11 CDs with over 13 hours and I'm in the middle of CD 3, so I'll be a while yet. If you want to read a blurb, here's the one on Fantastic Fiction.
Basically it is a thriller where opposing forces are looking for pieces of gold that basically make up the golden capstone of the Great Pyramid. It a race against time to save the world from a cataclysm that will be caused by a sunspot on the Sun's surface.
It is not my usual style of "reading", rather a thriller that makes me feel like I'm inside an action game, a bit like World of Warcraft or a Dungeons and Dragons one. There's a lot of description, and for the first hour at least falling stones, great dangers, boiling lakes of tar and so on.
Reilly has rather disconcertingly begun the book with the search for the first piece, and then regressed 10 years to tell us why this is all happening.
I hope I don't forget too much in the 10 days I'm having off from work.

The third book is THE PRIVATE PATIENT by P.D. James. We know right from the start of this novel that 47 year old Rhoda Gradwyn is only 23 days away from being murdered. She has decided to have a leading plastic surgeon remove a disfiguring facial scar that she has had for over 30 years. She goes to the surgeon's private clinic at Cheverell Manor in Dorset to have the operation. Indeed the operation is a success, but only hours later Rhoda Gradwyn is dead, throttled.

This is an Adam Dalgleish book and James' fans have been waiting since the publication of THE LIGHTHOUSE in 2005 for the next. We are reminded of that book several times by the investigative team. THE LIGHTHOUSE was a variant on the closed room mystery: an island cut off from the mainland by bad weather with seemingly no-one coming and going, so the murderer had to be on the island. (see my mini-review below: my rating was 5.0)

What we have in THE PRIVATE PATIENT it seems is a variant of the same sort of scenario, only this time using an English country house as the backdrop. Cheverell Manor isn't quite as isolated as Combe Island was, but the list of possible perpetrators is limited. Many in the cast of characters have secrets to hide, the Manor itself was locked at the pertinent times, but there is a local legend about the nearby standing stones, just to complicate things.

THE LIGHTHOUSE (2005)
Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over-stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is bizarrely murdered.
Commander Adam Dalgliesh is called in to solve the mystery quickly and discreetly, but at a difficult time for him and his depleted team. Dalgliesh is uncertain about his future with Emma Lavenham, the woman he loves; Detective Inspector Kate Miskin has her own emotional problems; and the ambitious Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith is worried about working under Kate. Hardly has the team begun to unravel the complicated motives of the suspects than there is a second brutal killing, and the whole investigation is jeopardized when Dalgliesh is faced with a danger more insidious and as potentially fatal as murder.