I bought this book since it was on sale and since I needed some light reading. It certainly fulfilled that need - this is a relatively uninteresting and silly but kind of entertaining thriller/mystery of a kind that you have read a million times before.


The blurb:

"The next explosion ripped Harry from his feet and threw his body clear across the gallery. But only flaming bones hit the security gate, melting themselves into the steel grating...

Lady Lara Kensington's family paid a high price in money and blood to found the gallery that now lies in ruins. Her search for answers leads her into a world she never imagined existed: a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert, where something astonishing is waiting.

A covert government operative is also drawn there. But at the end of a perilous journey lies an ageless power that can create a utopia - or tear down everything humankind has built over millennia of civilisation..."



**snipped** from www.amazon.com :

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
If he weren't such a good action writer, Rollins might make a dynamite climatologist. Each of his thrillers has featured as a central character an extreme environment, most recently the Arctic ice (Ice Hunt, 2003) and now the hot sands of Saudi Arabia. But while Rollins writes settings and scenes that sizzle, what's caught in the heat are usually familiar characters grappling with far-fetched threats, and so it is here. That one male lead is a danger-courting archeologist named Omaha Dunn seems less parodic than tired, and the novel's premise of a hoard of antimatter hidden in the legendary city of Ubar is almost as ridiculous as the idea that this cache has been guarded for millennia by an order of women who propagate without men, via parthenogenesis. Rollins writes less like Michael Crichton than Stan Lee. Most of his readers won't care, though, because there's just enough scientific gloss on the nonsense to make it palatable, and anyway, what they want, and what he delivers, is action, as Omaha and an American military agent, Painter, join forces with two Mideastern women, one a scientist, the other a billionaire, to locate the steadily destabilizing antimatter before it's snatched by a villainous cabal, or worse, blows up the planet. And that's why they'll buy this book in numbers big enough to have it flirt with national bestseller lists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile
The multiple elements in Rollins's plot border on the absurd: the quest for antimatter; women who reproduce without men; two women in search of Ubar, a legendary city buried in the Arabian Desert; the Queen of Sheba; and the prophet Job. Narrator Dennis Boutsikaris seamlessly switches genders, accents, and rhythm and systematically notches the tension higher and higher. His performance is flawless, yet it doesn't hide the thin plot and stereotypical characters. Still, the nonstop pace manages to keep the listener involved. G.D.W. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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