THE LAST ORACLE, another Sigma Force novel from James Rollins, is now out in mass-market paperback. And like most of its predecessors, it is a slam-bang mixture of factual speculation pushed to dangerous extremes and plenty of action.
Cmdr. Gray Pierce is crossing the National Mall in Washington, D.C. when he’s approached by a homeless man with his hand outstretched. Rather than begging for a handout, the man wants to give Pierce something. Suddenly, the man is killed by a sniper’s bullet as he hands Pierce what looks like a coin. The object is actually an ancient relic traced back to the Greek Oracle of Delphi.
When Pierce takes the dead man and the strange relic to the underground headquarters of Sigma Force — the elite team of ex-Special Forces soldiers retrained in scientific fields — more mysteries are uncovered. The homeless man is actually a renowned neuroscientist who was slowly dying from massive doses of radiation.
Pierce and his fellow Sigma officers trace down the dead scientist’s daughter and learn of the scientist’s esoteric research on intuition and the ability to foresee the future. This, along with a strange object the scientist hid in his laboratory before his murder, launches a trip to India and the whereabouts of the dead scientists’ close friend and research associate.
Meantime, a little girl, suffering from some kind of mental dysfunction, is kidnapped from her keepers at the Washington, D.C. zoo and ends up in the hands of Sigma Force. She is somehow tied in with the murder of the scientist and the disappearance of another Sigma officer who went missing while investigating an assignment in the Ukraine.
These and various others unrelated fragments — which include gypsies, autistic children and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl — slowly come together in a clandestine conspiracy of bioengineering experiments that hope to produce the next great world prophet.
Plenty of exposition is needed in the course of the unfolding plot, but it keeps getting interrupted by ambushes, sudden bursts of gunfire or a breathless officer commanding everyone to leave the premises immediately. It all gets rather exhausting and confusing after a while. Rollins eventually pulls all the fragments together by the novel’s end.
His fans rarely come to his stories for memorable characters, which is fine, because other than their unusual names (Gray, Painter, etc.), most of the characters are indistinguishable or dashed off with only a few physical details.
But, as usual, Rollins delivers the goods with plenty of gunfire, explosions, car chases and nick-of-time escapes. And he takes great pains after the conclusion in his “Author’s Note to Readers” to illustrate how much of his fiction is based upon fact.
THE LAST ORACLE is recommended for an entertaining and occasionally challenging way to pass the time at the beach, in the backyard hammock or lawn chair. —Alan Cranis
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL by James Rollins
