smalljeannie 's review for:

The Judas Strain by James Rollins

3.0

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Another really fun read from James Rollins. It brought back a number of characters from the last couple novels (and didn't incorporate too many new ones) which was fun. Being about a violent, highly-contagious disease made for a lot of nasty, skin-crawling, stomach-churning moments. The usual complaints are in effect here: flat character relationships (but they're getting a little better for me, now that Ive read these characters a number of times), unnatural dialogue (I get a little annoyed when, with 2 minutes left to save the world, one character gets all "no way" with the one who's trying to solve the puzzle and forces a 5-minute long discussion of why the puzzle works this way...shouldn't time have run out by now?), and predictability (a lot of the cliff-hanger moments have started becoming annoying because I can tell you with 99% certainty that certain characters are not going to die. In fact, I would think that in with all the impossibly dangerous scenarios Rollins' creates, more of his main characters should be dying off. It sort of ruins the suspense when none of them ever do.) I also felt that the ending was a little anti-climactic, though I can't really pin down why. It was, as usual, a very creative story and I learned some new scientific and historical facts; I appreciate how he devotes a couple pages at the ends of his books to outline where fact ends and fiction begins in his novels. He left us with a couple cliff-hangers at the end of this one that will keep me interested into the next (and one of them actually was unexpected.) Again, I have been entertained, though I might take a break after reading three Sigma Force books in a row. Sometimes you need to slow down.