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Originally Posted by Neal Stevens
Not a very good novel, imo. Read it, found it pretty typical. If it was different subject matter, I can't see how it could have gotten published.
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The reviews of it weren't very kind either, which surprises me as its not often Tom Hanks puts out a dog. I haven't seen it or read the novel, but I just finished reading another one by him (Deception Point) that was pretty awful. The writing wasn't bad - okay dialogue, good pacing and narrative - but the main character kept having near-death encounters over, and over again (and escaping virtually unscathed). To give you a sample of what I mean (spoilers):
She gets shot by an ice bullet (do these even exist?) but her and 2 out of 3 of her companions still, despite being unarmed, escape the Special Forces asassination squad of 3 "trained killers";
however they do fall off the glacier - only to survive because the drop was only 10 feet;
but then the ice shelf they land on breaks off (assisted by the detonation of a flash-bang grenade lobbed into the crevice by one of the evil-doers) and the 3 plummet along with it into the arctic ocean several hundred feet below;
they survive the fall only to die of hypothermia;
only they don't because one of them had tapped an SOS onto the floating icepan which was heard by the sonar operator on a nuclear sub that just happened to be nearby;
then later that day they are attacked by the same hit-team and the main character is shot in the arm by the machine-gun turret of the helicopter gunship they are piloting, along with another who is shot in the leg and both end up in the heavily hammer-head shark infested water (they are off the coast of NJ now);
the main character happens to have been in an unpowered one-man submersible with a stuck hatch and its slowly sinking; her and the other characer survive (she is saved by the third character) who are all picked up by a Coast Guard helicopter that just happened to be in the area just as seemed certain our heroic threesome would perish in the water (again);
the 3-man hit squad, which has to be the most inept ever to wear a Special Forces uniform, are all killed during their attack by our previously cornered and unarmed heroic threesom.
The End (and no, I didn't make any of that up).