James Rollins’s latest bestseller is a white-knuckled scream ride filled with action and enough imagination to fill a reader’s mind with hair-breadth escapes for hours. Mark off a night to read this one, folks, because you’re gonna be nailed to the pages till you finish the last breath-taking page.
I’m a big fan of his books, and those of you who read him probably are too. But for the uninitiated, Rollins is a versatile writer. He writes standalone thrillers like this one under James Rollins, as well as an ongoing military/suspense/science series about a special forces unit called Sigma Force. He’s also writing a young adult series about a young hero named Jake Ransom. As James Clemens, he writes fantasy novels.
Altar of Eden opens in Iraq with something mysterious going on in the Baghdad Zoo. Two boys stumble into a secret warehouse filled with equipment they don’t understand, and are saved by a huge monster they believe is culled from myth.
The action quickly shifts to New Orleans where veterinarian Lorna Polk is called into a strange situation involving mutated creatures found in a boat wreck going up the Mississippi River. Before I had a chance to really settle into that idea, Rollins ups the ante by including a huge mutated jaguar that’s gotten away and is going to go on a kill spree to feed herself and her young cub. That hunt through darkness immediately claimed all my attention because it felt like Jaws on land and I love this kind of fiction when it works. Rollins pulls off the hunt, the anticipation of the strike, and the horror with skill that sent me chasing through the pages.
The fact that the chase culminated in an alligator farm with an 18-foot alligator named Elvis was just frosting on the cake. I was really expecting a fight between the jaguar and the alligator, but was only a little disappointed when it didn’t because Rollins wrings every bit of nerve-racking suspense out of the situation that he can.
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