Miles A. Maxwell

Reading "Loss of Reason" is like taking a ride on a rickety wooden roller coaster; twists and turns are sharp and plentiful, climbs are filled with fear and anticipation, then, after reaching the top, the bottom suddenly falls out as you careen downhill at supersonic speed, screaming and praying that the cars will not crash and kill everyone. There is no relief until the end.

In this story, a pair of step-brothers come together and set out to rescue their family after a nuclear bomb explodes in New York City. Neither has super powers, but what they set out to accomplish can't be done by mere mortals. Most everything is destroyed, partially incinerated bodies and rubble line the streets, and yet throngs of survivors are doing everything in their power to escape the city. However, in most cases, they are all trapped by unmovable objects and will surely die without help. Everyone is also at risk after the radio-active rain cloud changes direction and heads back toward the city.

This is a story of love, hope, and compassion. Like the roller coaster ride, there are some slow spots and repitition throughout the story and the ending will surely upset many readers who didn't know this was #1 of a series - it ends in a cliff hanger with many unanswered questions. Yet the author includes two chapters of the next installment to answer some of them. If you enjoy action and suspense doomsday stories with strong lead characters, then you'll like "Loss of Reason" and cheer on the heroes.… (altro)

The idea of a killer killing authors using one of the author's fictional murder scenarios in real life sounded intriguing, but the idea was not fully developed within the novel, leaving me a bit confused. The agents use a sophisticated program called LINKS to map out various parts of the crimes and crime scenes, but in only the first two is anything mentioned about the manner of death being similar to a scene in the author's book. After that, the idea is never mentioned again--not even just a mention that they have the LINKS system scanning for scenes in an author's work that would match the manner of death. Since LINKS is coming up with no leads whatsoever, you'd think Naomi and Xue would be inputting as much information as they can into the program to try to get something.

I also did not understand what triggered the killer to start killing when he/she did.

Naomi seems to have a guy "in every port" that she sleeps with (which turned me off the character) and there's no indication that they know each other--until suddenly at the end, all are sitting together . . . It just didn't ring true to me.… (altro)