by Austin Dragon
Well-Tailored Books
359 pages
ARC
I requested the book because I thought it could be a change to read a mystery novel set in the future (kind of like the serie Continuum). I must say I was a bit afraid of the religious side.
Synopsis
It is the morning of September 11, 2125. The New York City police commissioner stands on the 170th floor of the Three Towers, clutching his chest in shock. The sky goes dark, filled with dozens of them—the opening attack of World War III. Not merely the planet’s third global war, but the first one of the Tek Age— a hell we have never seen before.
How did we ever get to this place?
In 2089, a former skin-runner-turned-star-reporter quietly investigates the Washington DC daylight murder of the most powerful political king-maker in the nation. It is just the tip of a wider conspiracy and the start of a chain of events leading to this world catastrophe.
The world is a very different place: Western Europe has fallen to the Islamic Caliphate, Israel is gone, Eastern Europe has merged with Russia and Beijing runs the anti-American Chinese-Indian Alliance. America is very different too. The US Constitution has been found unconstitutional and replaced, presidential term limits are gone, and the culture wars are over. The three-term American president is obsessed with keeping the nation safe at all costs—by ending religiosity. But the Resistance stands in his way.
Thy Kingdom Fall is Book One of the epic After Eden Series.
What I think of it
I wish I was able to read more of the book but I couldn't. I abandoned the book on page 94. Too much sanctimonious and religious for me. Dragon describes at length why religions collapsed, how they're now organised, what they should have done... Pages and pages on the subject.
Sad, because the characters are well described. We easily know who are the good guys and the bad guys. The reporter is likable as well as his boss. The way they interact, the way Dragon describes them in their daily routine is cool. I wanted to know how the investigation would go on but the investigation is completely lost in the details.
Dragon sets his world (which is 80 years from now) but it's quite the same world I must say except for the religious part of course. USA are now governed by pagans, people rejected all religions, which is difficult to accept knowing it's set in less than 80 years. I mean, some people in the books don't know nothing about religion... have they killed all the old people? That's not believable. Maybe he should have set his world in a future more distant.
I didn't like reading whole paragraph about the way people dress (mostly when they dress like nowadays bare a few change) or paragraph about the way people behave (which is mostly like nowadays one more time). For example, everyone has an e-pad and spend time reading his message including while discussing with someone else. Does it not remember you something?
In a nutshell
Dragon's book is the first in a series to come so obviously he needs to set the decor. Elmore Leonard, one of the finest author of crime fiction, wrote his 10 rules for writers. One of them is not to drown the reader in descriptions of characters, places and objects. An advice that Dragon did not follow unfortunately. It's not that it's bad, it's that it's too much. So I won't give a rate but I won't recommend it unless you're really fond of religion and plot. In that case, you should really like it!
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