Bernard Jan's Blog - Posts Tagged "thriller"

Ghost Flight by Bear Grylls

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ever heard of Bear Grylls? I truly hope so, because this former soldier in the British Special Forces, the youngest ever Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association and an honorary Colonel to the Royal Marine Commandos is also an adventurer, writer and television presenter. His Facebook bio says that “Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventure.”

I first heard about Bear Grylls seven years ago when I was on my vacation visiting my friends in Sweden and we watched his Ultimate Survival (also known as Born Survivor/Man vs. Wild) on the Discovery Channel. Needless to say that Bear Grylls captured my attention on the spot, that I wanted to see more of him, making me check for him online immediately after returning home to Croatia.

I loved the concept of his show in which he was left stranded with his crew in an unfamiliar wilderness – rainforests, glaciers, deserts, islands, to name just a few – with only one goal: to survive and find his way back to civilization.

The similar pattern follows his entertaining and exciting thriller Ghost Flight. Packed with action, adventure, beautiful landscapes of the remote Amazon jungle where lies hidden a mysterious WWII warplane, Ghost Flight guarantees to keep even the most demanding fans of this genre glued to its pages. It is so easy to picture Bear Grylls, an ex-soldier and a survivor, as an ex-soldier Will Jaeger, also a leader of a team of former elite warriors in their quest to uncover the mystery of the hidden warplane and the secret of Nazi evil forces (Wir sind die Zukunft) that lie buried in it.

I am a sucker for WWII novels and I am a sucker for Amazon rainforest. When those two are combined, you have an explosive reading before you. You are drinking up a cocktail made of ghosts from not so recent past, to majority of people almost forgotten, but the ghosts which are patiently waiting for their moment of the rise of the new Reich, and a pristine nature beaming with both beautiful and deadly life.

Ghost Flight is a successful debut novel with interesting and well-developed characters, full of action, twists and turns and gripping moments. It is also a very detailed novel which probably might not help us in a fight against the rise of a new Reich if it comes to it, but it could very well serve us as a survival guide in a primeval rainforest if we ever find ourselves in our personal mission under the canopy of magnificent trees where neither evil Nazis nor modern-day humans got to leave their destructive imprint.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews

Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Once in a while you come upon a book that throws you completely unguarded off your feet. When you buy a book you usually have an idea what to expect to find between the covers and you prepare yourself for a pleasurable journey into a new world unknown. But when you get a free copy of an e-book as a runner up for the review giveaway contest, you do not know much about it, or whom you are going to deal with and spend your Kindle-time with during the next few days or weeks.

Mara Winkle is the heroine of Eliot Peper's Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0. She is a strong female character caught in the bizarre love-business triangle between her boyfriend Craig and her best friend James. Craig and James are not too much fond of each other, which makes Mara's life even more colorful and exciting, pushing her every now and then to express her strong character in both decision-and-relationship making. Beside being strong headed and ready to cut off people seemingly without a second thought or regret, Mara is passionate about mountain biking and especially rock climbing. "Climbing was the most intellectually intense sport Mara had experienced. She had heard it described as physical chess. It was a kind of dynamic athletic geometry and there was a good reason bouldering routes were called problems. Every move was an exercise in balance, a special mixture of intuition and calculation." However, she is not so enthusiastic about studying at the University of Colorado, Boulder, especially when her best friend James asks her to partner with him to start a new software company Mozaik Industries.

This is a decision that changes both James' and Mara's lives. In their new partnership, James focuses himself on "what he does best, technical development to make Mozaik as awesome as it can possibly be" while Mara becomes "the buffer between him and all the rest of the random shit that needs doing" (Peper describes them as sales, investment, legal, and marketing). In short, they split their roles in doing what they are both best at: "programming for James, juggling for Mara." How this decision affects Craig we won't mention here, so as not to reveal too much and thus spoil the thrill of reading!

This is the moment when all the fun starts in Uncommon Stock, placing this novel among the ranks of fast-paced tech startup thrillers. For new entrepreneurs and enthusiasts Uncommon Stock may serve as a greatly informative and educational reading full of useful advice, but also as the warning on the cruel facts of starting your own business. "Founding a company is a fuck-ton of work. The sausage factory reality is far from the glitzy Silicon Valley mythology. It's a grinding slog that can be enormously satisfying and rewarding, but it's also painful, frustrating, and soul-crushing. If you're going to make it you'll have to sink blood, sweat, and tears into the process. And if you're going to make that kind of a commitment, you've got to truly believe in what you're doing. You've got to be such a zealot that other people are magnetically attracted to you and what you're working on. You've got to dream."

Eliot Peper masterfully leads us through a painful startup process, showing us all the traps and hardships we face along the way. No price is too high, every mistake is paid dearly. Before we realize it, we have already accumulated basic knowledge of the craft, ending up much smarter than we were before starting reading this exciting, adventurous, wise and gripping novel of a slightly unusual title.

In between twists and turns, Eliot Peper amazes us with beautifully intelligent descriptions and ingenious eye for a detail. "They people-watched along the way, relishing the familiar oddities of Boulder's unique human condition. Cyclists were out in force. Mara wondered why it was considered cool to wear jerseys plastered with tacky Fortune 500 branding. A shirtless homeless man was loudly touting the spiritual virtues of vegetarianism and handing out handwritten flyers on the evils of meat from a street corner." "The sky was mostly clear with a thin patina of smog and the sun shone down on an endless grid of concrete, steel, asphalt, and cars. An occasional palm tree or soccer field broke up the urban mélange." "Trees occupied a different dimension than humans. Movement was never an option. They were literally rooted in place and experienced the world through a permanently local lens. Seeds blew off in the wind to sprout new trees in places the parents would never see. And entire generations lived in one area."

Or, "The snakes in her stomach had distilled into a cocktail of righteous anger and frustration."

Beautiful!

I don't shun admitting: Eliot Peper bought me with his descriptions, if not only with his page-turning plot. Uncommon Stock is a high-quality intelligent and intriguing writing of a skillful and undoubtedly talented author whose success and a true value cannot be measured only by a number of sold copies, but also by a commitment and professionalism of this indie writer invested into creating the best end-product for his readers, the only ones that matter to him.

I wouldn't be surprised if it also helps a few startup businesses in the process with his motivational and inspirational dialogues, situations and advices, because, as the author himself says in the novel, "there is something ephemeral but infinitely satisfying about starting something yourself."

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Original blog post



View all my reviews

Black Canyon by Jeremy Bates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am so glad that Black Canyon is the first work by Jeremy Bates I've read. To be honest, since I have so many books waiting in line to be read – quite a pile on my table and in my Kindle, I wasn't planning on reviewing it at first. I wanted to save time and move on onto another book as soon as possible. But already in the first ten pages of this 2015 dark novella I knew this won't be the case, even if I reflect on it with just a few words.

It is a rarity to have an opportunity to read about the pre-teen young monster, who will grow into a new American psycho and a serial killer, from his own perspective. When a child (12-year-old Brian Garrett) tells you about the weekend camping with his parents in the Gunnison National Park in Colorado, you don't expect anything but the idyllic trip to the amazing and wild nature. And this is what you get. But coated with a few gory moments of surprise, very well timed twists, murders and true horror. The freakiest thing is the lightness with which Brian accepts his dark nature already at this early age, his calculated, heartless and almost mathematically precise survival instinct.

This is a quick-paced read about the seemingly normal but in truth one bad-vibed family which can be easily spotted and recognized too often around us, told in a simple and capturing narrative voice.

Black Canyon, which I also like to fondly call The Mean Innocence and The Growing of American Psycho, lingers in my mind with the aftertaste mixture of a novella and the movie Stand by Me and The River Wild movie, which I both quite liked, while Jeremy Bates, as an author, seriously competes to become one of my new darlings.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews

Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel by Lucas Carlson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel is a new ingenious creation by Lucas Carlson, a fiction and non-fiction author and entrepreneur, who already got my attention and won me over with his first thrilling startup novel The Term Sheet.

Big Data is a maddening ride through our near future where artificial intelligence is incorporated in our lives to the point that people rely on its services more than on their natural instincts, reasoning and decision making. It serves us, it helps us, it cures us, and then it kills us...

This is exactly what happens when Luna Valencia's most-advanced supercomputer in history Ancien starts to refine and improve on its own code which can “solve many problems in the world of artificial intelligence without human assistance, interpretation, or intervention.” It is the holy grail in the world of computers, but it also is the weapon for mass murder in the world of humans.

Luna Valencia's own baby becomes her executor when it falls into the hands of Doug Kensington and Thor Massino, two ill-intentioned ambitious and unscrupulous people. There is no safe place for her or anyone, because suddenly “people are dying. Everybody. Everywhere. People are dying faster all over—in every region of the world—at a higher rate.”

On her quest to uncover the truth about mysterious deaths, Luna not only faces losing her company but is hunted and chased into walking the path covered with bodies and smeared with blood, both of the innocent and guilty ones. Even losing her own life is something she has to deal with in order to stop computers from killing people. The whole world is in grave danger.

In “a weird mash-up” of computers and people, “nobody was deciding who would die. Nor was anyone determining how these people would die. The computer figured out those parts on its own. But (...) it was human beings who created the intention to kill. Not the computer. The one thing nobody seemed to be able to synthesize with computers was the creative intention. The spark of why. More and more, any discrete task could be better accomplished by computers than by humans. But the intention behind the task, the creative force. That was still as mysterious and intractable as the soul.”

Lucas Carlson in this extremely exciting novel also doesn't lose a poetic expression during this fast and crazy artificial intelligence ride for life and death. He barely gives us a moment or two to catch our breath before we are thrown into another life-threatening situation in which someone is programmed to die. The thin line between our near future and actual reality becomes even thinner when we come to realize that technology already today is infused in so many aspects of our lives. We submit ourselves to it, we reap its fruits and we think we control it. Do we, indeed?

Alarm bells are ringing through all 400 pages of Big Data with the warning. We better snap out of our indifference and, as the author says in his afterword, ask ourselves, “how do we prevent bad people from getting their hands on software that could potentially destroy us? The world’s next generation of mega-weapons will be software. Code in machines. Machines that drive our cars, fly our planes, control our homes, run our hospitals, and do something new for us every day. (…) It is time that we, as a global human race, invent and adopt systems of technological checks and balances. Software is infinitely easier to infiltrate and steal than atomic bombs. And if we sit back and do nothing—if we just throw our hands up and ignore the problem—we will have to live with the consequences. (…) And what’s at stake is the very survival of the human race.”

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Big Data: A Startup Thriller NovelLucas Carlson

Finders Keepers by Stephen King

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Upon reaching page 240 of Finders Keepers by Stephen King a thought stroke me. King cannot fail. What are the odds for that? Brilliant! This thought lingered and stayed with me until the very end of the book.

Finders Keepers, the second book in Bill Hodges Trilogy is a constant page-turner. A story about a vengeful reader obsessed with a retired writer spreads through 370 pages like fast and untamable fire. It burns its way to our hearts, brings us strong characters, lots of excitement and the fantastic plot! Again King has a surgically precise eye for the detail, which is a characteristic of his writing I probably like and admire most.

Brilliant! Five stars without much thinking!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Finders Keepers

Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It was love at the first read. It started with Watchers twenty-three years ago and lasted more than seventy books up to this date.

Dean Koontz, like very few authors, managed to keep me expectant, eager, thrilled and enthusiastic about his books. His latest novel Ashley Bell is no exception either. What's more and to be honest, despite being an author myself, I am now lacking words to describe how I really feel about Ashley Bell.

Ashley Bell is a complex novel of more than 700 pages about a remarkable young woman Bibi Blair who is determined to do the impossible and: 1) fight, beat, outsmart and escape death, and 2) find and save someone named Ashley Bell. Both seems rather impossible and destined to failure. But not for Dean Koontz and not for Bibi Blair.

Ashley Bell is a poetic, dark, psychological thriller in which the master of suspense and mystery creates a parallel world with the ease of The Maker. Koontz daringly plays the literary God and takes us into parallel worlds created by his incredible imagination, convincing us to believe and live the impossible. Dean Koontz has already taught as that nothing in his books is impossible, that “impossible” universes, creatures and situations are possible, we only have to imagine them.

His prose is a kaleidoscope of the most vivid colors and darkest shadows. It is a playground sanded with rarely seen scenes of violence and murders, chilled-to-the-bones moments and sentences poetically beautiful as sunsets. Our task is to imagine and bring them into life.

“If we were imagined into existence with a universe of wonders, then the power to form the future with our imagination must be in our bloodline.” – Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews

The Kill Order by James Dashner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The best books are not those with happy endings but the ones that make your blood boil and make you silently scream from joy or despair. You sympathize with their characters and relate to them; you cheer for them and want to help them through their trials and hopeless situations because they are real to you; they are your new best friends and you don't want to see them harmed or dead. But not all good stories have a happy ending. Just like in real life, our favorites and darlings are robbed of their choices, and instead of laughing and celebrating their victories with them, we end up with tight throats, moist eyes and swallowing tears.

The Kill Order by James Dashner is a high-paced octane-fueled dystopian science fiction thriller. In the story of survival of the human race on the Earth devastated by solar flares, chances are so slim that they almost equal to zero. Those (not necessarily the lucky ones) who managed to survive the scorching effect of the Sun that melted the glaciers and flooded the East Coast of the United States with a tsunami of boiling waters are yet to face the real trials.

In order to save the humankind, that is, a selected few, a deadly virus—known as the Flare—is released with the purpose of controlling the remaining population. The infection, though, very quickly escalates and is out of control, and the real battle for their lives starts for Mark, Trina, Alec, Lana, Deedee and their friends against the infected.

The Kill Order is the first prequel book of the equally successful three novels in The Maze Runner series: The Maze Runner, The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure, and the fourth of five installments overall.

Without pretended modesty, I cannot wait to read the last installment, The Fever Code. I look forward to the new opportunity and satisfaction to remind myself of the Glade and the Gladers, the Maze, the Grievers, WICKED, the Flare, the Cranks, the Right Arm, the Immunes, the Bergs, the Post-Flares Coalition, Thomas, Theresa and all their dead and alive friends. For, each of these books in their own way shook me to the core, and this is what a good book should do to its readers.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

Neon Fever Dream by Eliot Peper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Two powerful young women dominate Eliot Peper's mystery thriller Neon Fever Dream. At the heart of Black Rock City, an unbelievable story unfolds between Asha and Lynn. A story of love, friendship, betrayal, espionage, revenge, redemption. As the Burning Man festival approaches its climax, at Sub Rosa—the most exclusive black market gathering in the world—events explode in the huge blast of unexpected revelations, found and lost friends, graphic violence and dead and mutilated bodies, organized crime, undercover investigations and investigative journalism, sweet lies and bitter truth.
 
Passion and love are the only things Asha and Lynn can hold onto when their world mists with doubts and darkens with clouds of betrayal. But the power of forgiveness is the way and the light as the old truth disappears in the flames of the Burning Man and the new one is born on love, blood and ruin.
 
Eliot Peper is a proven master of storytelling. Once being seduced by his words, it's hard to tell no to his writing. This is the indie author I will definitely keep my eyes on, with the goal, plan and an easy and pleasurable task for myself to read all of his books one day. I know I won't be disappointed.
 
Please also read my review of Eliot Peper's tech startup thriller Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 (The Uncommon Series).
 
BJ
www.bernardjan.com
 
Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

Janus: The Devil's Election by Angel Ramon Medina

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I don't like politics and I don't trust politicians. When we look back at the centuries-and-centuries-long history of lies, deceptions and broken promises, this shouldn't be a surprise. Common good and national pride are the terms abused for personal gain by often incompetent individuals who should be anywhere else instead of leading countries or ruling our towns. History is their judge. The judge of their actions, turned coats, words spoken too easily behind the flimsy and fake smiles.

Human and animal rights, environmental issues, global warming, world hunger, wars, national, religious, racial and sexual hatred, poverty and health issues, unemployment, refugees, none of this is their concern as long as they can profit from the blind trust of their voters. History is their judge. Of everything they promised and didn't do. Of their lies.

Hard as it is to believe, there is one other group of individuals compared to whom our politicians look naïve and innocent like babies. They are the real puppeteers of our lives who rule from the shadow. To them, people like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton are just puppets on the strings, the ways and disposable means of achieving their goals. Loaded with money and supercharged with power, they can have anyone at any cost. Price is not the issue for the invisible throne of the modern slavery reign.

That is what Janus wants when he decides to orchestrate the 2016 United States presidential elections. He uses funding of both Clinton's and Trump's running for the office campaigns for funding his stem-cell substance criminal activities. The FBI-wanted criminal uses both candidates to conquer the country with this genetically modified drug, bringing the national elections to the unexpected and culminating end.

In his fourth novel—and first in the series of political thrillers—Angel Ramon Medina gives us the vision of the world behind the curtain of dirty political games and sick ambition of a handful of individuals filled with hatred and determined to enslave and destroy mankind. In their world no one is too important or irreplaceable to be spared from being injected with the devilish substance, nothing is sacred or too menacing to deter them from their mission. Janus and his compatriots are the reincarnation of pure evil and they turned the US presidential elections into their playground.

One thing that is more frightening than the dead bodies paving the way to the new American presidency is the belief that such evil as Janus exists only in Ramon's head and his novel. To accept such idea as pure fiction is as dangerous as signing a personal death warrant, for the mark of the beast may be stamped on our skin or running through our bloodstream even before we get to realize what is happening.

Stay alert: Janus is still not done with the world.

Bernard Jan
www.bernardjan.com

Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

Death by Default by Trish Reeb

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


My dad excels in chess. When I was a teenager, and even younger, I used to play with him. Sometimes more than I wanted. There were days when I really enjoyed the game, especially when we played on time control. Some days I was bored. Because the game was too slow and required too much thinking. Thinking is good, but when I play a game, I want to have fun. Not to test and challenge my gray brain cells.

I am grateful to my dad for teaching me the game. I was never as good as he was but he put so much effort in me. I wasn't too bad either but I could take more effort in learning from him. This is what our parents want from us. To take their knowledge, to give us their life experience. To help us.

Sometimes they can be clumsy and irritating, despite their best intentions. Like Conner Smyth who uses ten-year-old Jamie to teach him chess and play online games with a serial killer, in spite of the genuine likeness and fondness for the boy. Conner isn't Jamie's father, but the affection between the detective and a young chess champ is genuine and mutual. Conner's intentions are good—to put an end to collecting bodies with chess pieces planted somewhere in their cavities—but his judgment is bad and can easily endanger the boy's life.

Detective Conner Smyth is one of the oddest characters in mystery thriller novels I ever read, but that makes him so human and real, with so much passion for justice that burns beyond his physical, emotional and rational limits and logic. He is the guy who will rise out of his weakness and put himself in the hands of death to save the innocent, especially his friends, colleagues and family members. Yes, he is imperfect, insecure in front of the beautiful woman he loves and sometimes very submissive and humble in front of strong female characters in the novel Death by Default by Trish Reeb. But he is our unsung hero, natural and human, he is one of us.

Trish Reeb delivered us a great book. I was a bit skeptical before I start reading it, since Death by Default is a chess-themed mystery thriller, and chess and thrillers are a combination of two polarities that defined my childhood and maturity. Trish incorporated a relatively boring game (no offense to anyone) into an exciting and page-turning thriller, thus surprising me. And when she checkmated me, a smile kept lingering in the corner of my lips while my chest thumped with inner beats of satisfaction for well-invested and spent time.

Bernard Jan
www.bernardjan.com

Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan