Patrick Lee's The Breach & Ghost Country

So, you love thrillers in the vein of Michael Crichton, and you missed the 2010 release Patrick Lee's The Breach. This would be a terrible thing except that, a) we now have it here at the Urbana Free Library for you to check out, and b) in waiting this long the sequel, Ghost Country, has come out as well.


The premise of these books? Maybe I'll quote the back cover of the first one at you, because it doesn't give away too much:

"Travis Chase, a man putting his life back together after fifteen years in prison, takes a solo hike into the Alaskan Rockies. He's just looking for a quiet place to think about his future, but what he finds is trouble: a 747, downed in remote wilderness, the wreck impossibly undiscovered by authorities. Those aboard are dead, though not because of the crash. They've been shot.

This aircraft, along with the terrifying object it was transporting, is only the beginning for Travis. Within hours he finds himself at the center of a violent conflict that spans the globe, and a secret war that dates back three decades. A war for possession of radically advanced technology—that wasn't created by human hands."

This is a great little series, with the fun coming in equal parts from neat advanced technology, never-ending action, and surprising twists.

Of Possible Interest to Anglophiles...

A Channel 4 crime mystery thriller trilogy!  A thrillogy!  I'm brilliant--hire me, Hollywood marketing firm [1].

I've ordered the Red Riding Trilogy [2] this week--it's not here yet, but you can request it.  These are films about the police search for the Yorkshire Ripper [3], based on novels by David Peace [4], which have also been recently ordered.

Each of the three films is by a different director and takes the perspective of a different character--listen, I haven't seen these movies yet, but I want to.  To get a better idea of what they're about, I'll refer you to Ebert's 4-star review [5] of the trilogy.  If you don't like reading, but are somehow still reading this post, perhaps you'd like to watch the trailer, conveniently located below this very paragraph.




1. A brief Google search for "thrillogy" reveals that I am not the first to come up with the term.  My star-studded dreams are crushed.

2. Check out The Red Riding Trilogy from the library
IMDb page for Red Riding: In the Year of our Lord 1974
IMDb page for Red Riding: In the Year of our Lord 1980
IMDb page for Red Riding: In the Year of our Lord 1983


3. Wikipedia entry on Peter Sutcliffe

4. Peace is also the author of Tokyo Year Zero, The Damned Utd., and Occupied City.  We also own the film adaptation of The Damned United.

5. Roger Ebert's review of The Red Riding trilogy

Recycle a book! Contest by Matthew Reilly

What is the fate of many great but little-known books when they leave the new book display and go to their new homes in the stacks? We forget about them. The books languish in all their unread glory, waiting eagerly for a patron to once again riffle their pages. It’s time to recycle these books, so they can be read and enjoyed by a whole new audience.

I choose to recycle:
Contest by Matthew Reilly (2003)

“Winning is everything when you have everything to lose.”

Picture, if you will, an intense gladiatorial bout, called The Presidian. The host planet—Earth. The setting—The New York Public Library, a modern-day labyrinth. The contestants—seven sentient beings from across the galaxy. The charge—seven enter, one survives.

The Presidian is a competition dating back over six millennia, well-known throughout the universe--but not to anyone on earth. It is a battle among hunters and warriors, willing to stake their lives on their talents. The earth’s contestant is Dr. Stephen Swain. The radiologist was drafted to represent his race, not as a powerful human, but as a human possessing a “quick-thinking, adaptive personality”. Unfortunately, his daughter was pulled through the force field surrounding the library with him. Now the two of them are trapped and hunted. And Swain must summon all his mental and physical skills to ensure that they survive and escape the confines of the library.

Part science fiction, part thriller and part horror, Contest is an intense and plot-complicated book that will make you read obsessively to the final page. The author wrote the real-world architecture of the New York Public Library into this book as an accurate setting. Track the action by means of the NYPL floors maps provided at the front of the book.