Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Codex by Douglas Preston by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Codex by Douglas Preston

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Be aware that there may be spoilers in this review. 

Last week I reviewed Douglas Preston's Wyman Ford Series. In the first book in that series, Tyrannosaur Canyon, published in 2005, the main character the series is named for doesn't come into the story until much later. Instead, the protagonist in the first book through most of the story is Tom Broadbent, a former code breaker. Broadbent was the main character in Preston's 2003 standalone thriller novel, The Codex, along with his sidekick Sally Colorado. In The Codex, both protagonists were drawn with deep, compelling characterization that I can't deny would have really made the Wyman Ford Series worth reading (in fact, I wish Wyman Ford had been taken out altogether so the series could include Broadbent and Colorado as main characters instead). 

In this story, Tom and his two brothers' father Maxwell is a notorious treasure hunter and tomb robber. In his lifetime, he accumulated more than half a billion dollars' worth of rare art, jewels, and artifacts. When Maxwell gathers his three grown, estranged sons to his New Mexico estate, they arrive to find that all his treasure is missing. Robbery is suspected until they find a cryptic message from Maxwell, telling them he's devised a final test for them to discover his tomb treasure trove. Winner takes all. Tom's two brothers can hardly wait and enlist private investigators and mercenaries. But they're far from the only ones searching for this rare, priceless hoard of items. 

Tom isn't interested in the treasure at all, at least not until a drop-dead gorgeous ethnopharmacologist (explanation for that mouthful: medicinal products used by isolated or primitive people are investigated using modern scientific methods) contacts him. Sally Colorado tells Tom that years ago his dad tried to present a Mayan Codex to a museum for translation. Without experts in the language at that time, the museum rejected it. But, now that ancient Mayan has been deciphered, Sally and her Yale professor fiancé believe ancient herbal remedies contained within that Codex could revolutionize modern medicine and lead to cures for diseases. Reluctantly, Tom agrees to help them track down his father's treasure trove in Central America, where the Codex is presumably hidden. 

In the course of multiple, thrilling twists and turns and near-death experiences, Tom, Sally, and his brothers discover they have another brother--the true eldest son of their father. Borabay is associated with the native Tara tribe who live below the White City--a mountain temple in Honduras. The chief of the tribe tells Tom and his brothers that their cancer-ridden father asked to be poisoned and buried with his treasure in the White City. However, the chief only gave him a drink that rendered him unconscious. So now the siblings must rescue their father along with reaching the treasure before the other hunters in hot pursuit get to it first. 

As I said of this author in previous reviews of his work, he excels at providing authentic settings and scenarios that seem utterly believable, in large part because Preston himself is an adventurer. Having studied mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, and English literature, he's been a curator at a museum and a writer for National Geographic and Smithsonian, among other notable publications. With a friend, Preston once retraced on horseback a thousand miles of Coronado's route across Arizona and New Mexico--and nearly killed themselves in the process--in order to research a book. Preston's outstanding core elements are combined with The Codex's high-stakes plot and contain all the necessary complications and layers that provide unremitting suspense and action. 

While often Preston's characterization leaves much to be desired, that's not the case here. The protagonists in The Codex are beautifully drawn and fleshed out. Tom and Sally are such genuine, appealing characters from start to finish. I was rooting for them to succeed in their quest and fall in love. They really should have a series of their own. It's too bad Wyman Ford, such a cardboard character, took center stage in the Wyman Ford Series because I really believe Tom and Sally would have brought that sequence to life instead of simply starring in it intermittently (but powerfully) in the first book of it. If you're a fan of Lara Croft Tomb Raider type adventure stories that take you to ancient civilizations and feature brave, compelling, worthy heroes and heroines, this one has everything you could want and more. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Wyman Ford Series by Douglas Preston by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Wyman Ford Series by Douglas Preston

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Be aware that there may be spoilers in this review. 

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are mainly known for the books they write together (I've previously reviewed several of them on the Alien Romances Blog including Relic and Reliquary and The Ice Limit and Beyond the Ice Limit, among others), but they're also solo authors. Douglas Preston's Wyman Ford Series (published between 2005 and 2014) is classified as a series of "archaeological thrillers" featuring Wyman Ford who retired from the CIA after his wife was killed (predictably, he was the intended victim), and he went on to become a monk. In this series, he soon retires from that sedate, boring profession in order to help out the government with globally catastrophic events that he's apparently the only person with the skills to handle. 

When the series opens in the first book, Tyrannosaur Canyon, Ford doesn't come into the story until much later. Instead, the protagonist in the first book through most of the story is Tom Broadbent, a former code breaker who's the main character in Preston's standalone novel, The Codex. I actually thought Broadbent and his kickass wife Sally were the real stars of this show. The mystery and mayhem that ensue in this first story in the series involves a Tyrannosaur fossil worth millions of dollars on the black market. While this plot involves a lot of predictable elements, the setting is authentic enough that you can practically feel the scorching sun beating down on you in the hot desert. Ironically, the thing that I liked least in this story was the character of Ford. The retired spy as a monk felt like little more than the means to make the character unique when he was, in fact, anything but. I didn't particularly think Ford added anything to the four stories currently available in this series. He's too much of a cardboard character with no real personality or feelings to make him interesting. Furthermore, his skill set seemed like convenient things tacked on to involve him in the events taking place in the individual series stories. 

The second book in the series, Blasphemy, features a supercollider that the U.S. government has built deep under an Arizona mountain that may turn the Earth into a black hole if something isn't done to shut it down. Religious and cultural clichés absolutely abound in this story--painfully so! I'm not exaggerating when I say I didn't enjoy the subplots involving by-the-book, overzealous, and ridiculously stupid religious figures and paint-by-numbers Native Americans. The plot really wasn't capable of saving this story, especially when Ford is recruited by the government (again), then forced to deal with the woman he attended college with, engaged in a brief, passionate fling at that time, and they parted ways badly long years ago. Nothing about the relationship felt authentic or moving. 

In the third series title, Impact, there's a tremendously large cast, none of whom I found adequately fleshed out; along with wide variety of well-depicted settings; and almost too much plot for one story to hold. Preston does excel at providing believable scenarios that are backed with strong, valid science and then turning them into "science fiction". For the most part, the reader can suspend belief about the things taking place in these stories; that they could actually happen in real life isn't out of the realm of possibility. This one involves otherworldly gemstones, an anomaly on Mars, and a meteor, along with end-of the-world consequences if Ford doesn't intervene. I can't say I thought he had much to do with the salvation of the world though. To me, things seemed to just fall together for him, eventually, after a lot of scares. 

 

The last book released in the series, The Kraken Project, took away the major point in Preston's favor--the believable scenario. In this story, a programmer has developed an AI she's named Dorothy who's supposed to control a probe in search of alien life on Saturn's moon Titan. Instead, during testing, Dorothy realizes she's on a suicide mission and flees into the internet in order to ensure her survival. Eventually her program is downloaded into a robot, giving her at least something of a body. While this story is based on fact--a probe searching for life actually did explore Titan's surface in January 2005--the rest of this fictional story came off as hokey and downright silly to me. I admit that seeing the test robot that my sister's husband has roaming around their home at any time, tripping people and almost never following orders, let alone answering questions correctly, is the basis for my disdain. My brother-in-law has tested several iterations of these little, cute robots over the years, but they've become progressively stupider and more unmanageable instead of smarter and more lifelike. Dorothy is portrayed as almost entirely human in terms of her feelings and manner of thinking--combined with above-average intelligence and some might say awesome prophesying skills. Nothing about the main plot in The Kraken Project seemed authentic to me. I couldn't get myself to suspend belief enough to buy any part of it and all other subplots suffered as a result. Once again, we had a massive cast of characters, Wyman Ford leading them and not really convincing me he was worth following either. The settings, though, as usual, were vivid and genuine.  

This series would best suit readers who are looking for high tension, unrelenting suspense and action, and adventure set in captivating locations combined with (mainly) authentic science and technology turned into fiction with radical "advances". If you're looking for deep, compelling characterization, you won't find too much of it here other than in the character of Tom Broadbent and his wife in the initial series offering. Both of those characters would have made excellent protagonists in the series in place of the dull, mud-puddle-depth, straight off the character worksheet appeal of Wyman Ford. Do yourself a favor and read The Codex by Douglas Preston, which I'll be reviewing next week, along with or instead of the Wyman Ford Series, which really does have everything a reader might be looking for. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/