|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Robert Greer is the Chester Himes Award-winning writer of the popular CJ Floyd mystery series. He is also the author of the wonderful medical research thriller Limited Time. Be warned: trusting the book jacket description of this book can lead to bitter disappointment. This is not a medical research thriller. The science in this book is so implausible that it wouldn't qualify as good science fiction. Nor does the book have the strong female protagonist the jacket leads us to expect. Carmen Nguyen, a half-Vietnamese and half-black emergency room physician, is mostly there to take care of the men in the story and supply a pivotal plot point toward the end. She follows orders well, though, and that's important in this testosterone driven thriller. Having said all that, once I started to accept the book for what it was stopped looking for what I had hoped it would be, I enjoyed it. The story centers on two of Carmen's patients, Luke Redstone and Walker Rios. Redstone is hospitalized with a terminal case of leukemia and comes to Carmen's attention in her role as an emergency room physician. Since retiring from his work as a uranium miner, Redstone's life has centered around breeding the most ferocious game cocks ever seen in southern Colorado, and he is worried that his birds will languish without his care. Inexplicably, Carmen promises to ride into the desert on her vintage motorcycle to care for the birds herself. When she finds herself over her head, she and Redstone enlist another patient, Walker Rios, a river rafter with a background in military intelligence, to assist in this enterprise. Rios is consumed with guilt over the death of a ten-year-old boy on a rafting expedition he was leading and is only too happy to focus on the old man's problems instead of his own for a while. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the evil forces of biotech have invested a lot of money trying to uncover the secret of Redstone's breeding practices. When Nyugen and Rios come too close to discovering that secret as they try to protect Redstone's birds, very bad people try to remove them from the equation. The climax is a blockbuster worthy of a Bruce Willis film. There's some pretty graphic violence in this book, including a very explicit description of a cockfight that may put some readers off their meals. But if you like hanging out with a bunch of ex-Marines while they kick ass and take names, this suspenseful roller-coaster of a thriller will keep you interested and entertained. Greer writes with polish and authority, and his prose is as clear and hard-edged as the light in the Colorado desert.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, October 2003
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
