Fatal Error [Mass Market Paperback]

The action comes fast and furiously in the newest Repairman Jack novel from F. Paul Wilson. Although it grieves me mightily to say that the Repairman Jack series is soon coming to a close, FATAL ERROR rocks the fabric of the RP cosmic shadow war with this tale of pulse-pounding adventure that pits Jack against the darkness that might well bring down the darkness on mankind and the universe entire. A man named Munir Habib is being forced to perform acts of public ignominy in order preserve the lives of his American wife and son, who have been taken hostage. Although the kidnappers seem only to want Habib to suffer disgrace and humiliation, Habib is helpless to report the kidnapping if he wants his family to survive. Enter Repairman Jack, a "fixer" whose talents are required when the usual methods of law enforcement are useless. Jack is pushed into fixing Habib's situation and, what with Jack's involvement in the ongoing cosmic shadow war between the Ally and the Otherness, he has his hands even more full than usual. Dawn Pickering's continuing bizarre pregnancy finally comes to a belated end when she delivers...something. She only gets a quick look at the baby before it is taken from her--and what she sees frightens her. When she is told that the baby has died from overwhelming birth defects, Dawn doesn't believe it. Jack doesn't believe it, either. So much is happening and events are coming together. The Septimus Order and a homicidal clan called The Kickers are busy working to extinguish the Internet and, if they do, they will succeed in paving a pathway for the Otherness, which will overtake and destroy our plane of reality. Can Jack pull together all the threads that are dangling over his head like Swords of Damocles? Hang on to your hearts, TombRats, because you're going to get an aerobic workout without leaving your reading chair! FATAL ERROR is shipping now, so get your copy from Gauntlet Press before they're all gone! And be sure to check out [...] for more information about this superlative supernatural thriller series.

"Fatal Error" is the 14th and penultimate Repairman Jack Novel. Author F.P. Wilson tells us in a prefatory note that the series will end with number 15, tentatively titled "The Dark at the End. Previous comments by the author indicate that last RJ novel will serve as the final lead-up to a "heavily revised "Nightworld", the truly shock and awe capstone of his "Adversary Cycle" that was first published in 1993. Both the Adversary Cycle and the RJ series, as well as some of Wilson's short stories (some available free on the internet) comprise "The Secret History of the World", a long and involved tale that revolves around an eternal struggle between two über-God-like entities, called the Ally and the Otherness, for dominion over all sentiently inhabited worlds in the multiverse.

In the early RJ novels, The Secret History took a back seat to Jack himself, and his role as a fixer for clients that for various reasons, could not go to the authorities. The emphasis was on action, and Jack's clever approaches to solving problems with the least amount of violence (sometimes that last part didn't quite work out). There was always some tie-in with Ally/Otherness battle, but it was not in the forefront. For the last 4 or 5 RJ books however, and in "Fatal Error", it is the Secret History that takes center stage. Whereas all the RJ books have been self-referential, this feature is now greatly expanded, and includes all previous RJ novels, the whole of the Adversary Cycle, the two YA Jack titles that have been published so far and several short stories. Fatal Error, as well as the last several books, are therefore much less self-contained and stand-alone than the earliest RJ novels. Rather, they comprise one very long novel broken up into book-length chapters. For this reason I do not recommend trying to read this as a stand-alone, or to jump into the series here. Do yourself a favor and go back to The Tomb and read forward from there, or better yet, look up the Secret History of the World and read all the novels (about 20) in the sequence that Wilson gives.

The stakes were already high at the outset of Fatal Error and the tension rises steadily throughout. There is a client, and a job, but it is mostly all backstory to the main event. All our favorite RJ characters, past and present, are here (one of them bites the dust) and the inexorable path to the final battle as all the players move into position is clear. Like the other RJ books, Fatal Error was a great read and kept me up late. The writing is still crisp and the plot moves along briskly. I am most curious to see the what "The Dark at the End" looks like, and most of all, to see how he revises "Nightworld to pull all the little bits and pieces of the whole RJ (and YA RJ) and Adversary Cycle series into a single congruent and cohesive whole.

tick...tock...

JMT

As we all know, the last few Repairman Jack novels contained more exposition and less of the suspense, intertwined plot threads, and human interest that made the series so interesting. Much the same thing happened in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and for much the same reason: exposition comes before denouement in any series novel.

Here comes the denouement!

This is the penultimate novel in the 15-volume series, and it feels a lot more like the best books from early in the series, with a little extra punch. The tension builds -- although it won't finally be resolved until the next, final book in the series -- the plot threads intertwine, and there's even a sub-plot or two, as in the older books. I missed the intertwined sub-plots in By the Sword and Ground Zero. They added a lot to Jack's character. That feel of watching a real person engaged in both human and superhuman events makes a welcome return in this volume, in my opinion. Jack is by turns noble and ruthless; the noosphere, the Lady, and the world are in ever-increasing danger; and Ras -- I better not say his name -- inches toward victory against our outmatched heroes while they watch each other's backs. I especially enjoyed Jack taking on even a minor side-project, as these always added to the realism of the characters and their world. There hasn't been a good "repair" mission for a while, and it brought back the fun feel of the first parts of the series.

I read By the Sword and Ground Zero, enjoyed them to some extent but felt it was more of a duty to read them, and now the payoff has begun. Best $14 I've spent on Amazon in quite a while, and Wilson has guaranteed I will buy the final volume on the first day of issue.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 31 reviews  4.1 out of 5 stars