Cryptos Conundrum, The [Hardcover]

In defense of the author, he knows his CIA history. I will give him that. But this book is one weird piece of writing.

Is it sci-fi? Is it a thriller? Is it New Age? Is it Crypto-Mormon? (No insult to Mormons, here) Halfway through the book I still wasn't sure. Really. I wanted to believe. I love X-Files and Star Trek...but this one misses the mark.

First of all you have this unkillable guy named Chalmers. He fights in WWI and doesn't die. He doesn't age, so he signs up for WWII and also doesn't die. He has visions of angels/beings that rescue him now and again. He has no love life, doesn't relate to other human beings, doesn't LIKE anyone in particular or believe anything in particular, but he gets consulted on everything everywhere, in every generation. Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon. It's all the same to the genius Chalmers. Oh, and there have been versions of Chalmers all through history.

The angels, or alien beings, or whatever they are, are supposedly in charge of planets. They have names like WON, and TU, Tha-Ree, Vor, and Fieva - you get the idea. Their "headmaster" is (surprise!) named Ga'Lawed. There are twelve of them. And every day (in eternity) they are sent out to seed new worlds. And the day they go out is called SUNDE. Get it? Sometimes they leave the apes alone to evolve, sometimes they interbreed. So, one of these angels (Number Fieva) becomes disgruntled with the boredom of his eternal chore and gets the naughty idea to interfere in an evil way, and that is where all the evil aliens (Roswell, UFOs, greys and Reticulans) come from. It is convoluted, weird, and could have been fun or scary or compelling. Unfortunately, it is just boring.

I would not recommend this book to anyone.

Reading what previews I could, before picking this book to read, I thought I would have a fascinating look into the CIA and the work it took for a man to decode a piece of sculpture in front of the CIA headquarters. Then I started reading the book and soon was wondering if this was fantasy, science fiction, future history (as Robert Heinlein wrote), suspense, religious allegory, or a brief history of the USA. I guess it was a mixture of them all which is rather difficult to do in one book and I don't think that this author was successful at accomplishing it either.

The book basically covered over 2000 years of time over the course of 112 chapters with some of those chapters being only a page long and jumping a decade or more in time. In the later phases of the book, each chapter skipped even more time. While we knew that the main character for most of the book (and after that his descendents) was a brilliant genius in math could read two books at the same time and in a few minutes each, he came to solutions to problems faster that most computers of our time could, and for the book's sake was the one behind the throne, advising the presidents and his staff in succession in what to do to keep the USA running properly and avoiding trouble with other countries and the space aliens that were also targeting the earth.

Other than the fact that he was aging at a much shorter rate than his colleagues, we don't know much about the man personally until at one point he goes on a date and in the book's fashion about two paragraphs later they were married. Somewhere in the next few years they had a son but he was walking and talking before we knew he had joined the family.

I looked forward to reading this book thinking it would be fascinating, but by half way through I was bored silly with reading it. As the book moved to it's end faster and faster with less and less detail and jumping whole decades and more between chapters, it felt like we were getting a condensed version of what was happening. The author thought up an interesting plot, but I don't think he was very successful at carrying it out. I had to push myself to read the book since I was given it for review. I don't recommend it. After the first third of the book it was BORING!

I'm always on the lookout for new (to me) authors to discover, so when I came across this book it sounded right up my alley. First book by a retired career CIA operations officer (according to the flyleaf); "The conspiracy thriller of the century..." according to Douglas Preston (on the cover); "... greatest agency thriller of all time" according to David Hagberg (back cover); "Inspired by a real-world mystery", per Larry Niven.

Wow! Sounds right up my alley! A new voice in the espionage/thriller genre! Very cool! Maybe the next Vince Flynn; who knows?

But then I started reading the thing, and lo and behold! A whole bunch of metaphysical babble about immortality and some kind of spirits or ETs or something rescuing the hero from being gassed in the trenches of World War 1, and how the world is part of some space/time continuum or something that had absolutely nothing in THIS planetary existence with a normal person's idea of espionage or "conspiracy thrillers". All wrapped up in an absolutely turgid and overwrought writing style.

Gooooooooooooooooood grief...

Fuggedabouddit.