A collection of fragments rather than a single story
This is an odd book. It’s hard science, modern-day, sci-fi. It takes place in exotic locations such as the Large Hadron Collider, Livermore Labs and the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, as well as a rural small town worried about a potential alien invasion. It features a smart and capable science investigator and troubleshooter reporting to the President of the USA. With all those ingredients, you would think you were in for an exciting ride, but somehow the book never quite gets off the ground. It’s about 12000 words, which is short for a novel, but plenty big enough to fit in a good story with a bit of care. Instead, what we get in this book is three, seemingly unrelated, short stories.
The first short story involves a reporter being shown round the Large Hadron Collider by a young scientist who wants to leak a secret. We get some “gosh wow” about the scale of the place and the equipment, then the dangerous secret turns out to be a blip on a graph.
The second short story has a bit more meat to it, and involves science troubleshooter Danie Rice investigating strange lights in the sky in Tonopah, Nevada. We follow the investigation process as he works out the cause and reassures the locals.
The third story is even shorter and features some people in a lab playing with cameras and lightbulbs trying to make sense of the revelation from the first story.
I understand that this is just some kind of prequel for the later books in the series, but I was disappointed that it didn’t have a story of its own. I have read plenty of free prequels, and most of them at least try to engage the reader with something more than this. If I am being harsh, I’d guess that the stories in this book are just some of the author’s backstory notes which have been edited a bit and bundled together. Because of this, I still have no real idea what to expect of the books in the main series so I’d have to say that this free prequel has not done its job.