Every once in a while I pick up random books that hook me with their jacket blurb from the bargain big at the book store. Barnes & Noble’s discount section is especially good at it. So that is how I came upon Tremor by Craig Dirgo.
What attracted me to the book was simply the mention of Nikola Tesla. I’m a nut for science based science fiction. (Its one of the many reasons I prefer Angels & Demons to The Da Vinci Code.) So when I saw that the crux of the book was that someone had a machine built on Tesla designs that could cause earthquakes… I was in.
Sadly, this is the second book in a series, but fortunately does not rely heavily on the reader having actually read the first book. The first book is about Einstein. I’m going to have to track down a copy.
Anyway, it was a good book. If you like Dan Brown or Clive Cussler or those types of books, you’ll probably like Craig Dirgo’s stuff too. Its typical “male adventure” … smart and/or skilled guys tracking down bad guys and fooling around with inordinately hot women mostly in exotic locals. I mean, the main character, John Taft, who is a spy, goes to sneak a peak at some of Tesla’s old papers at the Tesla museum in Belgrade, only to find that the curator just happens to be a really hot chick who he charms and sleeps with in a matter of hours so he can steal her keys and break in. Its par for the course in books like these.
Overall, fun, but not something I’d find myself reading more than once.
for $1.
. First, let me express my disappointment that this is an iUniverse published book. iUniverse is another POD publisher, though its not as bad as PublishAmerica since they are backed by Barnes & Noble it is still paying to be published and it still keeps your book out of most bookstores. That aside, this is actually a pretty good book. As usual for the genre, the dead come back to life and kill people. In this case, any dead person with an intact brain will get back up, but just the bitten. The author skips the gory details of the world being overrun and the first days of the walking dead by starting with a character who has been living in a secluded cabin for the past three weeks. After that it follows what is a fairly typical formula of survivors finding each other and banding together. He throws into the mix a government installation run by a mildly insane dictator type who actually becomes commander-in-chief after the fall of NORAD and all the major political players, at which point he decides that nuking all the cities is the answer. He doesn’t, because if he did it would be a really short story. Instead, there is a mini civil war, and dead soldiers becomes zombies, and only one scientist gets out. After a bunch of other stuff, the book actually ends happy. The zombies are gone and the remnants of humanity start putting the pieces back together.