eep Sky is Patrick Lee's third and final book in his Breach Trilogy, detailing the adventures of Travis Chase and Paige Campbell. Travis and Paige are involved with "The Breach" - a mysterious opening in the fabric of reality deep below the ground in Wyoming which is known, to a select few, as an opening that spews forth mysterious pieces of advanced technology known as "entities". With Deep Sky, Lee brings his story of the Breach to a close, including an explanation of what the Breach is, why it came into being and how various players from the past two books come into play with the Breach itself. In his books, Lee has woven a world of engaging science-fiction stories that have felt to have an overall arc to them, which he pays off here. The book begins with a missile strike upon the White House during a televised presidential address and the power machinations of the former Vice-President and newly promoted President Hold. From there, Chase and Campbell are in a race against the clock to unravel the meaning of a note left behind at the missile launch site - "See Scalar" - and have 24 hours to unravel the note's meaning and how it relates to Paige's father and the leadership of Tangent, which oversees the Breach. Utilizing Breach technology, especially an entity called the Tap which allows the user to go back in time to a memory and interact with not only the memory but the entire world of that time period and can be used to reconstruct long forgotten or lost information.
The end result is a mixed bag. On one level the story pulls the reader in and hums along at a breakneck pace where things are not always what they seem. But the ultimate payoff of the book, and the trilogy, can be somewhat unsatisfying, and leave the reader with more questions than answers. A good part of the first half of the book involves unraveling the secret that lies below a mining community in northern California. Yet this secret is really more of a MacGuffin and the importance or even meaning of its existence is never really explored and in fact conveniently dropped as the action shifts in new directions. The purpose of the Breach makes sense overall, but leaves a number of questions, especially about the Entitles, up in the air or dismissed with a hand wave. In fact the book works best as a stand-alone entry - those without having read the first two books will not notice some of these problems and in fact may find the answers more satisfying.
A hard part of Lee's stories is his wholesale distrust/disdain for those in political power. A common thread of his stories has his villains being wide sweeps of the federal government, with his villains in Ghost Country being essentially the President, his entire cabinet and some business leaders, and in this book features an ambitious Vice-President engaging in assassination and work with others in the government to take over something powerful that they do not understand or know a lot about. While power and control are considered by many to be the ultimate aphrodisiac, the motives of his villains never really goes much deeper than mustache twirling power hungry and ambitious men.
When I heard Lee was ending his Breach series, I was disappointed. The concept gave a lot of potential for stories, with unlimited possibilities of the sometimes God like entities. In this book he ties the package up into a somewhat neat (if incomplete) bow. I hope that he finds a new rich vein which to mine for a new series of page-turners.