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Extraction Point!


When you look at the cover of a book, sometimes it gives you a general idea of what the book is about. By the cover of Extraction Point! by Travis S. Taylor and Stephanie Osborn, you will think that you are getting a pure action book where the good guys are fighting a bad guy. Technically, that is correct, but you're going to have to read a pretty good bit of the book (all the way to the end, actually) to get to the fight pictured on the cover. That's not to say that you won't get fights throughout the book, but it does lend itself more to the science than the action, especially near the beginning.

Dr. Ray Brady is part of a super-secret team that is charged with protecting the country from aliens or time traveling bad guys. Seriously. Sounds like a really cool job, huh? Well, I think it would be cool, but also very dangerous. This team only takes the best of the best of the best. They have to be top athletes and have brilliant minds as well. Samantha Brady is the team leader and Ray's wife. Ray's best friend, Jay, is also part of the team. Those three are the core members and are assisted by a variety of medics and techies to try and detect those threats. When they run into an "unsub" (unidentified suspect) in New York City though, Ray gets a true run for his money. Ray is probably one of the best fighters in the world, but this guy just can't be beat. Ray thinks that he has the guy cornered on the top of a huge building, but suddenly the man jumps over the edge and just disappears. The team knows that this isn't going to be the last they see of this guy, so they've got to figure out how a man can jump off of a building and disappear in mid-air!

The mysterious unsub is called Dr. Drago. He has technology that is beyond what our team thinks is currently possible. They figure out that he is using string theory and is manipulating space so that he can travel from place to place instantaneously. When they start digging more, they find out that he has been hopping into banks all over the world to steal money, into secured research facilities for radioactive material, and into another lab to steal an experimental virus that is ultra-resistant to radiation. When you put all these things together, that paints a really bad picture of what they think he's trying to do and what they need to stop from happening. As is the case from time to time though, Drago has his own reasons for what he's doing and whose to say that he's not right, even if his methods are inhumane. The Bradys are going to have their lives severely changed if they can even live through it with their family intact!

Extraction Point! is very technical. The fight scenes are so perfectly described that I'm pretty sure that you could act them out if you wanted. They spend several pages describing string theory and how it works. If you find yourself bored (or totally lost), just skip that part. Personally, I don't think that you have to understand string theory to understand that the bad guy is hopping from one place to the next. I found the first 70-80 pages or so to be a more difficult read. I understand string theory and the science behind it, but honestly, it's a lot to read through. Once you get past page 80 or so, you'll find that it gets much more exciting and hard to put down. So my advice is to skim the beginning if you get bored because after you get to the meat of the story, it is very good. I like that it's left open if they want to have a sequel as well, but the ending still feels finished if there never is a sequel. That's a hard task to accomplish sometimes. If you're looking for a sci-fi action novel that tends to be heavy on the science at times, you'll love Extraction Point!.



-Cyn, GameVortex Communications
AKA Sara Earl

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