The Lost Island: A Wonderful Adventure on the High Seas
The Lost Island by Lincoln Child & Douglas Preston
So I read a novel along while ago that was very good, and was a thriller written in the style of Michael Crichton. It was by an author duo Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston, and I made a note to keep an eye for out for their work. Soon I found he co-written many things with Douglas Preston and stumbled across a book called The Ice Limit, which once again was a Michael Crichton like scifi thriller with an amazing cliffhanger ending. Then life got busy and I forgot about those guys for a while and didn’t remember until Kindle has had a daily deal on the third book in the adventure Gideon Crew series, The Lost Island written by these guys was marked down to a dollar and I had to grab it.
The book begins with the corporation EES (Effective Engineering Solutions) who tend to be interested in the profit of treasure hunting a lot, hire Gideon Crew, a scientist and master thief to steal a single page out of the book of Kells. This book happens to be one of the most previous and well protected ancient books of all times. Despite being a near impossible thing to pull off, Gideon succeeds. EES takes the page, scrapes off the ancient paint to reveal a map. It is a map to a lost island where a cure to all injuries and diseases is hidden. The head of EES is crippled and has a strong interest in this and offers Gideon the job of retrieving it. Gideon also happens to have a terminal brain illness and finds that he cannot turn down the job.
He is assigned a partner, Amy who is a sea captain. They go under cover as a married couple to sail along the desolate Mosquito Coast following the instructions of the ancient map. And along the way they must face pirates, storms, and other dangers.
So the good? This is a pretty darn good adventure novel. This is on par with James Rollins and Michael Crichton. It’s just so well paced, detailed, and has fantastic action. Also this is easy to follow. This is the third Gideon Crew novel and I didn’t feel lost. And to be fair, for an Indiana Jones like series this is very good. When reading this, I thought back to how James Rollins ditched stand-alone adventure novels, to have every future adventure novel feature Painter Crowe and his Sigma Force. And that was awful. I hated the cast, especially their James Bond like lead. The lead for this series was Gideon Crew was well written and he was a descent lead. I wouldn’t mind following him in other novel to learn more about him which brings up the fact that Amy was a great character. She was deeper than I thought she would be and sometimes just frustrating at times. But everything about her made her seem more human. That is up to the last couple chapters where she starts acting wildly out of character. Then there was one thing I really like. Ice Limit, the book I spoke about earlier in the review is sharing the same world as Gideon Crew. The aftermath of that scifi cliff hanger of The Ice Limit is taking place in another part of the world. And the ending of this book implies Gideon is going to have to deal with it in a future novel and that just makes me smile. I mean I’ve been wanting to know what happened after Ice Limit for a while now, and I’m glad I may get a chance to find out.
The bad? This book has a couple faults. First, Gideon stands in the shadow of Amy. This book in a way becomes more her story than his, which made Gideon seem very vanilla. And about Amy. In the last couple chapters she did some things that are way out of character. As she made such a stupid choice at the eleventh hour I was confused and found that the ending she received was a sad one without any good reason. I didn’t think she deserved an ending like that and it was not sure why she was written that way. Also if you read a lot of adventure novels, this was bit predictable. As someone who read all the non Sigma Force James Rollins books, and Crichton books, I will say I predicted stuff to happen a couple chapters before it happened. A lot novices to the genre won’t have this issue though. But I find these sort of books are about the fun and adventure, not all the twists and turns.
Overall, this is the definition of a junk food version of a book. It’s just a real fun adventure, nothing special beyond. I would say this is a must read. It’s not perfect, but it is a great time.
3 ½ smoothies out of four.
Overall Review: A Wonderful Adventure on the High Seas.
