Realistic Fantasy

This is a review of The Atlantis Gene (The Origin Mystery, Book 1) by A.G. Riddle. This was an interesting book for me, the moral of the story I had heard before but at the start of the book I never saw foresaw how it would end and the book seemed to take a turn every time I had grasped what was going on. This constant change in plot and theme left me confused and unable to grasp the whole picture of the book or even what I had just read, a frustrating thing for an experienced reader. The first few chapters of the book held important information for the rest of the book but the setting and backstory to people like Josh Cohen and things like Clocktower seem to be vital to the story but have almost no bearing to the total plot and what effects they have seemed very forced. Also, the Immari Organization is the focal point of everything that unfold in this story and is simply followed and barely decoded by our two two protagonists David Vale and Doctor Kate Warner, both of whom I find to be great characters with good backgrounds.

The past and the future just seem to blend too perfectly in this book. Things like Kate reading the journal of Patrick Pierce, while unknowingly being his daughter, to Dorian Sloane really being Dieter Kane and them both being healed and preserved in Atlantian tubes and meeting their fathers because of a gravity time distortion are just some normal things in this book; and in my opinion everything is too perfectly connected and the main characters have way too many connections from the get-go that pop up at almost every new discovery in the book. The same kind of principle applies with the Immari and the history of the human race. Every worldwide catastrophe and important event in our history seems to be linked and it is all somehow connected to the mysterious ‘ships’ around the world (only everyone in the book thinks these ships are just unmoving structures left by a long gone race and they are only partly right). Although I disliked all the connections with the characters, the historic connections are interesting, like strings all going from important historic event to the Atlantian origin and people can only guess what they mean. The one constant in this book besides the main characters is the Atlantis Gene (fitting because of the book title). The gene has been sought after by the Immari for decades and is the greatest mystery to the all powerful organization, along with the Antlantian ships.

The book revolves around two main characters. The first, David Vale, ex-special forces, CIA and Clocktower operative, who is highly motived, intelligent and skilled and has been fanatically tracking a shadow organization whom he believes was the real author of the 911 attacks, which took his wife and his life as he knew it. The second, is Kate Warner, a brilliant autism doctor with a painful past and an uncertain future that uses the pain of her past to try and push forward and help the greater good. These two collide quickly in the story when both their lives are rocked by attacks on their organizations that lead to realizations about what their organization really were and what their life’s work has amounted to. Both struggle to grasp who and what they really worked for and do not discover the real truth until the end of the book, when it is almost too late. Years of training keep David alive and motivated to decipher and confront his true enemy and his gut and morals make him protect and bond with this new Doctor he is aligned with.

While David and Kate struggle to get information from their unknown inside source and unravel the mysteries of this shadow organization, the Immari hunt David and Kate, knowing both could undue plans decades in the making and needing information from Dr. Warner. The Immari’s hunt is lead by the ruthless and cunning Dorian Sloane, later found to be Dieter Kane who proves to be a third main character and the constant antagonist. Kane will stop at nothing to destroy David, capture Kate and make her life a living hell and recover his father, Konrad Kane, whom he fanatically believes is alive after over 70 years.

Both sides hunt desperately for the secrets of the ‘Bell’ and the plagues it has released time and time again, the mysterious ‘ships’ found around the world and the Atlantis Gene which seems to be the key to everything. David and Kate on one hand are fighting what they think the Immari will do with all the answers and to save the human race as we know it and Kane and the Immari are fighting for the final steps to their goal and the ‘saving’ of the human race through unimaginable methods.