Paul Perry's Reviews > The Dark River

Oh dear.

Following on from The Traveler, which was a promising thriller combining some interesting philosophy with a decently written adventure, this second volume takes that groundwork and flushes it down the toilet. The plot becomes ludicrous, the attempts at philosophy become badly thought out individualistic rants and the writing has somehow become painfully bad. Seriously to the point that it doesn't read like the same author. I'm not saying that The Traveler was Dostoevsky, but this is awful. The writer even seems to have lost some knowledge; in the first book he appeared to know his technology, and made excellent use of it both for his comments on the surveillance society and in terms of plot, but here it becomes the kind of badly constructed techno-thriller pseudo-scientific guff you tend to find in bad Tom Clancy knock-offs.