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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
It all comes down to this, 4 Sep 2003
Bob Mayer (writing under the pen name of Robert Doherty) has taken many a reader on a wild, amazingly adrenaline-pumping ride over the course of his Area 51 novels, and everything is finally brought together and explained in this seventh and final book of the series. I have no idea why I waited so long to read this book, having been enthralled by the earlier books as I read them one after the other a while back, and it did take a little time to regain my bearings. The author always manages to provide a lot of pertinent background information early on in each novel, and thank goodness for that. To say these books are action-packed and full of twists and turns barely begins to convey the sense of non-stop events, discoveries, missions, deaths, and surprises that pack these books almost as densely as a neutron star. By this point, there are a fairly significant number of players in the game of earth’s future: the Airlia alien race who has been on earth for millennia, the Airlia traitors who broke off and formed their own faction (and it remains murky at all times as to which side is which), the leaders of the Airlia factions and their “shadows,” Watchers and Ones Who Wait who have spent untold centuries doing just what their names imply, a mysterious and absolutely world-threatening race called the Swarm, and now yet another alien race steps to the plate. The course of the saga stretches from one end of human history to the other. The Third World War has ended, leaving massive casualties across the entire globe, but the alien threat, while diminished, remains. Mike Turcotte, the special forces soldier turned budding intergalactic hero, must first find a way off the top of Mount Everest, where he has secured the legendary sword Excalibur, and fight yet another day against not only the aliens still present on earth but their dangerous minions rebuilding a huge array on the surface of Mars. Among other things, he must also rescue and overcome his confusion with his increasingly mysterious former boss and lover Lisa Duncan, save entire populations from the little plots of savage revenge unleashed by retreating Airlia forces, and come to terms with a deep mystery about himself, one which threatens to prove his very own memories a dark lie. The nonstop action in these pages is relentless and absorbing, but this final book just seems a bit rushed to me at certain points. With all Turcotte and his colleagues have been through over the course of a couple of thousand pages of story already, a few major tasks just seem a little too easy this time around. The proclaimed Truth is not all that shocking, either, although it did add a dimension I had not put much thought into. Still, this is definitely a book all Area 51 fans must read; if you’ve gone this far in the series, you are not going to stop now, and Doherty’s always frenetic, action-packed storyline will have you wishing that the series would in fact never end. Fear not, though. This remarkable series of books may come to a conclusion here, but the Area 51 saga, in a different guise, is in the works, with the recently published Area 51: Nosferatu leading the way.
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