Seven Ancient Wonders [Audio CD]

Reilly's back and his latest thriller explodes off the page with the force of tornado. He introduces us to a new character, Australian superhero and all-round good-guy, Jack West Jr., whom we meet on the run with nine other people, one of which is a 10yr old girl, named Lily, (which explains the subsequent names) and the rest are Wizard, Woodsman, Fuzzy, Stretch, Princess Zoe, Pooh Bear, Noddy and Big Ears.
Other than Lily and the Wizard - an elderly professor capable of matching the fittest trained soldiers from the `mice' nations (as Reilly puts it several chapters later) - the rest are handpicked warriors bristling with every weapon known the man and with a few others borne from Reilly's imagination. The best of the lot is the `warbler' which is to West as the trusty maghook is to Schofield. This creation is able to deflect bullets by emitting a powerful electro-magnetic field.
So, we find ourselves sitting back in a comfortable armchair, drink perched on one side having carefully arranged three hours personal time, ready to be taken on the rollercoaster ride that is a Matthew Reilly novel.
Take a deep breath, suspend disbelief, forget quibbling about the overuse of punctuation and cliched one-liners and prepare to be entertained in a manner that no Hollywood blockbuster could currently hope to match.
The premise (given just after the first mission is completed) is that we are fast approaching the several thousand year old cycle of the alignment of the Tartarus sunspot and the Earth. It turns out that the Great pyramid once bore a golden capstone with a crystal that diverted the power of the sun and gave three options to humanity. The first, to not do it and suffer the destruction of the planet, the second to give peace on Earth and the third to enable a nation to earn a thousand years of supremacy. All of which brings the international best onto the stage to hunt down the prize. To achieve this the task force under West has to reassemble the capstone which Alexander the Great cut into seven pieces and hid at each of the ancient wonders. To compound the problem ,as six of the seven wonders no longer exist they all got moved elsewhere and only a little girl, named Lily, has the ability to read the work of Thoth and translate the text pointing to where each piece is hidden.
So, seven wonders, seven missions.
The first mission finds the team locating the head of the Colossus in the Sudan. A race against the European team headed by Captain del Piero and the Americans led by West's old mentor, Marshall Judah, with the vicious Cal Kallis of the American CIEF force. The second Mission is for the base of the mirror at the top of the Pharos Lighthouse concealed in Tunisia at Hamilcar's refuge, the third Mission is an inmate break out from Guantanamo Bay via its golf course, the fourth Mission for the Statue of Zeus and Temple of Artemis, it's capstone pieces now located at the Louvre and Vatican. After an interim piece about an attack on the Kenya station where the team looked after Lily for ten years, mission five relocates the Hanging Gardens which, other than the Pyramid is the only intact wonder (for about three hours till the mighty stalactite is dropped on West). Mission Six takes us to the tomb of Alexander at the Temple of Luxor and we finally end up on the Day of Tartarus at the Great Pyramid where all the protagonists come together for a fitting explosive finale.
Over the course of nearly five hundred pages Reilly weaves us through more ancient traps than the largest maze in the world, uses more weaponry than a small war, has more near-deaths, survivals and acts of derring-do than any Errol Flynn movie and still has our cast come out nearly intact with a grin on their faces having saved the world. Reilly's arrival a few years ago with Contest, heralded a new action writer who took the concept of action far beyond anything that contemporary writers produced. Reality is not a byword for Reilly and to criticise them for unrealism is to miss their point entirely. What they are superb at is captivating your attention so entirely that the cup of tea on the armchair rest gets forgotten and goes quietly cold.

I've read a few of Reily's stand alone books and enjoyed them, but this first book in this series is great. I like the concept, the characters, the action/suspense, and the writing style. Jack West reminds me a little of Dirk Pitt, but somehow his actions and strategy seem more real. I think fans of Cussler or DuBrol would enjoy this series.

The strategy was often silly and the characters were kind of flat, but the edge-of-your-seat urgency and pseudo-history babble were great. This was a good airplane book in the way that Cussler's usually are.

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