Philip Donlay — Aftershock

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A USGS team is murdered as they are placing instruments on a volcano that is about to erupt. The photographer accompanying them is abducted and held for ransom. She is the lifelong friend of Donovan Nash and of course he goes to the rescue.

The story is a fast-paced thriller set in Guatemala. Plenty of action in the middle of earthquakes, volcano eruptions, shootings, chases on land and in the air… It kept me reading. I liked the characters, tough and determined but with heart.

The thing that always amazes me about some novels, movies, and TV shows is the seemingly coincidental connections between characters and events from the past and present. This book is full of them. It appears everyone in the book, good and bad, is connected in some way to Donovan Nash’s past.

I’m not complaining. I’ve been known to write a few such instances into my own books. J

Gregory Benford & Larry Niven — Shipstar

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Larry Niven is one of my all-time favorite science fiction authors and Gregory Benford is not far behind. Shipstar is hard SF based on science and technology pushed beyond our imaginations, but not beyond Niven’s and Benford’s. An Earth starship visits a huge bowl in space, powered across the galaxy by a star, filled with multiple forms of alien intelligent life. We are not only entertained by the humans’ reactions to this wonder, but we are exposed to aliens point of view trying to figure out what these strange primates are all about.

This is the second of a two volume saga. You can read it alone but will understand much more if you read the first volume, Bowl of Heaven, first.