Gideon's Sword: A Tale of Great Action and Very Dumb People

So a few months ago, I grabbed this book from an Amazon Daily eBook deal. It was an adventure novel called Lost Island by Preston and Childs. It was the fourth book in the Gideon Crew series. I never read the earlier novels, but I read a couple things from Preston and Childs before and liked them, so I give it a try. And it was great. There was an elixir of life, cyclopes, and pirates. I really enjoyed it and made a note to check the earlier novels. So I went back to the beginning. Here is my review of the first book in the series called Gideon's Sword by Douglass Preston and Lincoln Childs.

So what is it about? It starts with Gideon Crew. His father was shot before his eyes by government officials as a child. Years later, Gideon does some impromptu spy work and exposes that the government killed his father as part of a cover-up. This gets the attention of the government’s subsidiary independent agency called EES They hire Gideon to do some spy work for them to track down info about a Chinese super weapon and Gideon Reluctantly takes the deal.

So the good and the bad? Let’s start with the good First, the action scenes are great. Every bit of action is thoroughly enjoyable and are some of the best written action I’ve seen in a long time.

Now the bad? This book is so strange. They try to write Gideon as a smart ass and suave, but comes off as total dork to the reader. He will say something really goofy and in the real world people would laugh at him. But here it’s meant to be serious. Also women fall for this dork for no reason which is just weird. I know Jim Butcher does this in a tongue and cheek self-aware kind of way with the Dresdin Files, so it has a fun feeling about it. This is just weird because it’s so self-serious. Also this book seems to happen in another dimension because people are really dumb. For instance, Gideon will go to a walled warehouse with high security and literally has the conversation of, "If I were to break in, how should I do it?” with the guard and the guard tells him everything. And Gideon uses this info to break in. He’s a ‘master thief’ that does all the opposite things a thief should do, like having no plan and leaving his fingerprints everywhere. Then a CIA agent decides to blindly trust Crew for no reason at all. And the list goes on. This book has so many stupid plot points in it, that it’s kind of hilarious. I was really disappointed at first. The fourth book was smart, witty, fun and nothing like this. But halfway through I started to enjoy it like a B movie from the syfy channel because that’s the only way could enjoy it.

Overall, this book is bad. But oddly enough I had fun. Maybe for the wrong reason, but I did enjoy it in a corny bad action movie kind of way. I’m not sure how something like this evolves into the book in the series which is great. Maybe the authors just needed a couple books to get their footing because this is pretty bad. I can't recommend this to anyone, though. This would be a one star book but the silliness of the choice made does boost it up to mediocrity. If you like stupid action, give it chance if you stumble across it at a rummage sale or something similar. But for the rest of everyone else, this may not be worth your time. That is unless, you like things that are so bad it's good.

1 smoothies out of four.

Overall Rating: A Tale of Great Action and Very Dumb People