Search - Deep Fire Rising (Philip Mercer, Bk 6)

(Spoiler warning!)
Be prepared for a huge disappointment if you've read
the prior adventures of Philip Mercer from this author.
Dubrul more or less disembowels his hero in this work and leaves off in a
cliffhanger ending which has the reader severely disappointed and unwilling
to witness any further horrors to such a good hero in any subsequent works.
All his earlier books were a thrill to read and one gets the impression that Dubrul simply wanted to 'kill off' his hero for some reason, perhaps he was bored of writing these stories or carried away with his own successes.
At any event, if Mercer returns it must be as a completely broken man.
I have never seen any author so disrespect the hero and to be able to
successfully resurrect the remains after breaking his soul so completely.

DuBrul writes his most creative novel, mixing science fiction with James Bond and current events. However, I felt that he missed the chance for his "hero" to take the next step in his evolution as a character. DuBrul does break from his characteristic formulas in this book, adding twists and surprises, and yet still at the end, I feel the book falls flat.

I had a problem with the plot line of this book. The plot line about digging at area 51 is completely unrelated to the rest of the plot. I kept waiting for DuBrul to tie it in what was discovered there later but he never did. It seemed to me he started to write one story and changed his mind and went in a different direction. I read one other Philip Mercer book and it was much better than this one.

I hadn't realized that I had read this one until I began reading it. The excerpt didn't clue me in that I had read it before. It was very good the first time. But then Jack DuBrul is good most anytime!