Impact by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m not sure how libraries or others classify this book, as science fiction or spy thriller, but it is a bit of both. The lead character, Wyman Ford, is a James Bond-like figure, quite over the top, but good fun if you accept that going in. The plot is imaginative and the action scenes superb. The author appears to have done a good deal of research on astronomy and seamanship off the Maine coast among other things. The story bordered on the plausible at all times. The characters are really too one-dimensional, either good or evil, and the good ones impossibly smart and knowledgeable about virtually everything, which makes this disturbingly close to comic-book quality, but I enjoyed it. I listened to the CD version. At first I didn’t like the reader as his voice is a bit coarse, but he turned out to be a good actor and did the book justice. My one big complaint is that the language and characters were unnecessarily crude throughout much of the book, with numerous racial and sexual epithets and descriptions on top of the usual obscenities.