Lots of Talking, Many Little Details, Not Much Els

This review is for both books, "Alpha" & "Redux," books 1 and 2 in the series.

Books 1 and 2 are so similar that the same review works for both.

I'm not sure what kind of story this book was trying to be, but I don't think it reached it. While I enjoyed "The Jakarta Pandemic" by the same author, this story is rather bland and mostly uninteresting. Though I think the narrator was partly responsbile for this, the writing style is mostly to blame.

Book 1 starts out somewhat perplexing, as it wasn't clear who the good and bad guys are. So many characters introduced, it was hard to keep them straight, particularly when you didn't know if they were important or not. It continues like this for many chapters. I considered stopping and moving to another book, but it never got quite bad enough to quit it. A decision which I later regretted.

Throughout both books, there really never was a main character. I think there was supposed to be a protagonist, but many minor characters had more "screen time" than he did, that it's fair to say there was no main character in this series. For me, this made it difficult to follow the story path.

Both of these books had lots of details on minutia that wasn't needed and made the story drag on. It featured various groups of characters talking endlessly. For example, we're given the name of every street and road that characters see or travel on, nomenclatures for weapons and military hardware, and so on. Usually, hearing about what kind of equipment the character is using is fine with me, but in these books, most of the time it seemed out of place.

Though there weren't many, the action sequences were better than the non-action parts of the story. The author takes too much time to set up the various pieces of the puzzle before getting to the heart of the plot. Many of the action scenes are like the movie Groundhog Day, where you - as the reader/listener - relive the scene several times, each time from someone else's point of view. This was both annoying and boring.

Personally, in book 2, I think the more interesting story would have been the Russian inhabitants perspective in Monchegorsk.

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Boring

I couldn't even get through the first chapter. Painfully boring. I wish I would have started listening to it right away so I could have exchanged it.

Masterpiece

Well-woven, fast-paced thriller that has several twists and turns. Worth the read/listen and quite realistic.