The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas

"The Paleontologist is Night at the Museum as imagined by Michael Chrichton and Stephen King" - the blurb on the cover of this book says.

If Michael Chrichton and Stephen King were to have a baby and were the baby to grow up to be a fiction writer, this is the kind of stotry the writer could have imagined. There are dinosaurs here, there are ghosts here, there is a mystery of long disappeared 6-year old girl in the museum. The twist here is that the ghosts are lingering souls of dinos that have suffered during the great extinction. Somehow the disappearance of the girl is related to the dinosaurs. But, there is no ghost of the girl.

Dr. Simon Nealy is a paleontologist who takes up a job at the Hawthorne museum where his young sister had disappeared twenty years ago when he was supposed to be looking after her while his drug-addled mother couldn't be bothered to to it. The disappearance of his sister, Morgan, was never solved, nor were remains ever found. Simon is guilt-ridden since Morgan disappeared under his watch and hopes to get some closure by being back at the museum, possibly looking into her disappearance circumstances and possibly uncovering the guilty abductor. There are a number of insteresting characters and the story is very engaging and well-written.

By all means, read it.

Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino

 Keigo Higashino is stated to be one of Japan's best-selling authors. He is known for hisDetective Galileo mystery series.

I like police procedurals like the books by Michael Connolly. This one is a police procedural in Japanese style, whiuch is the reason why I picked this book.

I never got the relationship of the name of the book to the story. There is one reference to a DNA analysis to establish relationship but not at all crucial to the story and certainly not enough to warrant the title or the cover of the book. It's almost as if the cover is from a different book. Anyway, the most I can say is that the story is not boring. After the case is closed the author spends about 30-40 pages explaining the details of how things unfolded while we already know what has happened. It really seems unnecessary.

I am not going to search for another book by this author.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

I started watching the SyFy series of the same name on Netflix, so got this book to make sense of the TV series.

The series made a lot more sense after I read the book. First of all, both the series and the book, switches back and forth between time periods and also between current events and a virtual reality game called Three Body. The story is much easier to follow in the book.

Here is the premise of the story. It is based upon the fact that the three body problem is "chaotic" and it does not have a closed form solution. What am I talking about? Although, most people are not orbital mechanics experts, I believe I can assume that most people can understand the concept of the two body problem. Sun-earth, earth-moon, earth-satellite are all two body problems. These are governed by Newton's law of gravitation The orbit of the smaller body around the larger body can be mathematically described by an elliptical orbital shape. That's how we know when the seasons will occur, when night and day will occur and also when and how high tides will be. However, if there are three bodies (stars or planets) of similar sizes, then their motion cannot be expressed by a closed form solution and the motion can be wild (chaotic is the word, NOT random), stable and unstable, depending on conditions. In this story, the Trisolarans live on a planet in a three body system where an advanced civilization will get destroyed due to the upcoming unstable positioning of their three stars. For example, at one stage all three stars are aligned with each other and with the planet with life of it. What will happen if such positioning takes place? The gravitational forces will add up and anything on the planet that is not "tied down" will get sucked into the closest star, hence the end of civilization on that planet. Think about the Poseidon Adventure (if you have seen it) but only on a much larger scale. Remember that this is happening in cosmic time scale, so the civilization can see this situation coming up and try to cope with it. The freaky solution is to "dehydrate" the whole civilization and store the flattened/folded bodies until the situation stabilizes after a few million or billion (earth years). After the stabilized situation comes up then hydrate everyone to restart the civilazation! Like this solution?

Trisolarans are looking for a world to colonize to survive. One person on the watch on earth, Ye Wenjie, at a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) like site in China transmits a strong signal that can reach the Trisolar system 4 light years away and receives a reply 8 years (round trip delay) later, apparently from a pacifist Trisolaran that says repeatedly, "Do not Reply because the Trisolarans mean to exterminate all life on earth to colonize it for themselves." Spoiler alert. Ye has lost all hope in humanity to survive in the long run. So, she replies anyway.

Now, the Trisolaran know the location of a habitable planet to colonize. They send a fleet towards earth to colonize it. But, thankfully they can only travel at one-tenth the speed of light some of time and about one-hundredth the speed of light, on average. Do, the fleet will actually take 400 years to reach here. Earthlings have 400 years to plan to defend and defeat the invaders. Meanwhile, there is a bunch of people on Earth like Ye, who are welcoming the Trisolarans who have been communicating with them. The earth-defenders have to somehow learn what the Trisorans have been communicating with the earth-bound collaborators. Defenders have to capture the data storage device that has all the communication between the Trisolarans and the collaborators. So, there is an even freakier solution involving super strong invisible nano-strings.

In the book, all geniuses that have developed the nanostrings and defenders are, of course, Chinese. In the TV series, the brilliant people are all non-Chinese Americans.

That is about where the first book ends. There are two other books. Nowadays, a trilogy sells well, unless of course one can write a heptology (Is that a word?) and make a billion. More about that after I read the two other books in the trilogy. I have put a hold on the books at the library. So, stay tuned and feek free to leave comments.

The Bin Laden Plot by Rick Campbell

The blurb on the book cover says, "Readers who miss Tom Clancy will devour Campbell". So, I picked it up at the library. 

This is a readble book with the usual formula for conspiracy in high places. It moves quickly with very short chapters, some just one page long. Although there is submarine on the cover, the submarine action is only a short part of the story. Mostly it is about CIA agents who kill with impunity, never miss a shot, and take on as many as 9 bad guys and finish them off with nary a scrach. Hey, but you did not come here for reading about reality, right?

A US naval ship is sunk in the gulf off the coast of Iran in international waters. Obviously, the conspiracy wants the US govt to think that Iran did it. But, attention is diverted to a rogue autonomous UUV (Unmanned Undersea Vehicle) that supposedly sunk the US ship. The UUV needs to be hunted down and destroyed by the USS Michigan (that I have seen almost 30 years ago in dry dock sitting on blocks and have a USS MIchigan coffee mug to prove it). Another submarine USS Jimmy Carter is also in the area, and the "crooked" Secretary of the Navy, no less, cooks up a story and asks the Michigan to sink Jimmy Carter, claiming that it is the mothership of the rogue UUV. Anyway, far fetched that this is, a crack CIA agent is called in from retirement to help. There is a trio of childhood best friends.  Christine is the director of the CIA, Jake is the agent who is called in  and the third, Lonnie, is now a contract killer who is being run by the conspirators to kill all who may identify the conspiracy. Lonnie also wants to kill Jake to settle an old score. The deputy director of the CIA is crooked too in cahoots with the crooked Secy of the Navy. You get the picture. Read it if you still want to. It will kill a few hours if they need to be killed too!