Jeffrey Anderson, M.D. sure knows his embryonics, his genetics and his Michael Crichton. His SECOND GENESIS is a technothriller set in the Amazon rainforest, where a genetic miracle has taken place within the heavily guarded research facility housed there. A race of superchimps has been created, and these monkeys do all the normal primate stuff, plus they come equipped with mad skills for reading, writing, thinking … and killing!

Hired to help with the project, biologist Jamie Kendrick starts spouting rhetoric about science proving God doesn’t exist. Then when the chimps escape and go on their little crime spree, Kendrick and her fellow employees have to play God again via terminating them with extreme prejudice. Meanwhile, they’re also trying to dodge another group who want the monkeys for themselves, for wholly selfish reasons, of course.

You can almost separate SECOND GENESIS into two halves: A bad half and a better half. Or, to be more specific, the half that is overloaded with leaden discussions like “I want maximal quality images – what can you get from 8 Tesla? Give me a volumetric acquisition with quarter millimeter cuts in all three planes down to C3. Try a shorter echo train and increase your number of excitations. Make some surface reconstructions of the cortex, too” and the half where people actually do something, even if it much of it plays like a fourth-generation carbon copy of Crichton’s CONGO.

I almost didn’t make it far enough to see the story actually kick into gear. That’s supposed to happen within your first chapter (if not the first page), not 150ish pages in. The action that finally occurs is superficial and not of the wowee-whiz-bang variety; at best, this is an airport read (and, incidentally, exactly where I reluctantly consumed it whole). Make no mistake: I love a good science thriller like I love the ladies. But shouldn’t it be a mix of the two rather than a split? It’s the lit equivalent of being invited to a “pizza party” at your friend’s church, and you don’t get to eat until after they try to convert you to Baptism.

The “M.D.” after the author’s name should have been a red flag, since most doctors wrongly believe they are experts in all fields. Why was it necessary for him to include such initials? They only matter when you’re cutting me open, not when you’re writing a thriller, and Anderson could use some more education on how to do the latter. For one thing – for the love of God, please – he needs to not end his novels with serious marriage proposals between just-met characters who have never before professed their love or even gone on a date. That’s not just lazy; that’s plain hackneyed.

If you want a truly good tale of genetically mutated monkeys, F. Paul Wilson’s SIMS is the way to go. –Rod Lott

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