Kate's bravery and determination in a situation she didn't fully understand had me firmly on her side from the get go. It was honestly so refreshing to see him get shot up and then have to recover. David was a typical action hero, only with one characteristic not often seen in action heroes - vulnerability to bullets. It was a lot to follow, but to Riddle's credit it all did balance out fairly well, and I never felt lost at any point.

Sometimes, in fact, there was almost too much going on - mysterious kidnappings, cures for autism, lost Atlantean cities, time distortion, portals, magical plagues. There are times when the story falls back on over played tropes - Nazis are the root of all evil, after all - but the origin mystery is relatively unexplored territory, in my experience at least, and the various threads of the narrative combined in new and interesting ways. Preying on the insecurity modern, particularly western, society has about terrorism, the idea of a global terrorist organisation is a frightening one, and Riddle plays with the idea effectively - particularly in David's half of the narrative.

Riddle's story is far reaching in scope, with plenty of twists and turns to keep the pages turning quickly. In the style of Dan Brown, AG Riddle takes a pinch of truth and adds a bucketload of elaboration and imagination to create a globe trotting thriller that, until it's final stretch, is almost plausible. The quest to solve it will challenge everything they think they understand about themselves, the people they know, and the origins of the human race. His only leads are a few cryptic messages from the 1940s and research scientist Dr Kate Warner, who has become intricately connected with the terrorists without knowing it.īoth have only some of the pieces of the whole puzzle. He's been after them since 9/11, but the huge scope of the organisation makes them difficult to pin down or predict. Clocktower agent David Vale is on the tail of a large terrorist organisation.

The Atlantis Gene by A.G. Riddle