Legacy: An Event Group Thriller [Hardcover]

I thought this book was much better than the previous novel- I enjoyed the plot much more and the premise was more interesting than Primeval. The only weakness was that I felt the ending was a little rushed and could have been better explained; to me, it seemed as though the author was too busy planning for the future of the series and just stopped writing the last chapter. Overall, I enjoyed it and liked the character development as well as the introduction of Tram.

This Event Group story takes a new and improved twist in the arc of these books. The last couple of stories were getting repetitive and it seems Golemon got things back on track. By the cover you can tell the plot is based on the Moon. All the characters in the previous books are here and even a few more interesting ones are added. I won't give away any major plot lines, but this book goes back to the days before the Event Group existed and tells how Senator Lee got the ball rolling. Best of all, this book will lead readers into future stories that should keep fans of this series entertained for some time to come.

I wish there was a way to give "half-stars"--two-and-a-half is what I really want to give this book.

I've enjoyed the previous books in this series to varying degrees, but this one stretched things a bit. The basic story had some promise but I was continually distracted by the repeated fallacies and technical mistakes that kept cropping up. The author really, really needed to have someone (or several someones) who are familiar with spaceflight mechanics, spaceflight history, and basic astronomy review this book before publication.

Just a few of the issues (warning, possible spoilers): there is no possible way using any currently available system to approach the moon at 35,000 mph and have any hope of slowing down enough to enter lunar orbit; as mentioned by another reviewer, M33 is not the closest galaxy; how can you possibly have two planets "sharing" the same orbit but on opposite sides of the sun, yet only be a few hundred thousand miles apart (it would be more like a couple hundred MILLION miles apart, never minding the notion of major planets sharing an orbit in the first place--and if they WERE actually on opposite sides of the sun, an explosion in the vicinity of one would not throw the other out of its orbit); calculating elapsed time of 700 million years from a supposed offset of the position of Venus in a photo has lots of issues with it, not the least of which is that the background starfield would be unrecognizable after that period of time (because of the motion of all the stars around the Milky Way--in that time frame our solar system would have made nearly three complete revolutions around the galaxy); and most irritating to me, the continued mixing up of the name of the rocket that carried Americans to the moon in the 1960s and 70s (it was the Saturn V, not the Atlas V, which is a much more recent rocket that has only been used for unmanned space probes and that has much less power than the Saturn V--throughout the story it is referred to as the Atlas V, except for a few instances when the correct name was inexplicably used instead). Finally, I've read over the relevant sections several times and still cannot for the life of me understand how the author proposes the underground "colony" in Ecuador got "buried" with little damage as the Andes mountain range uplifted. Certainly a colony could have been buried by deposition and then raised through such uplift, but not in a manner that would leave it largely intact within some sort of cavern system. Caves don't just grow up and around something like that.

I am also curious to see how exactly the author ends up explaining (if he does at all) the notion that humans nearly genetically identical to us existed (and apparently died out) 700 million years ago, hundreds of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion gave rise to most of the major life forms on Earth. Since this isn't explained at all in "Legacy," it is hard to say whether this is really a mistake or just something waiting to be resolved in the story.

As has been noted, the ending to this book makes it clear that this story arc is going to be ongoing in future books. I have gotten enough entertainment from the series as a whole so far to give the next one a try when it comes out, but I have to be honest and say that if some of the silliness isn't eliminated I won't go farther than that. That would be a disappointment, as the characters and general stories have been interesting.

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