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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 9187973" data-attributes="member: 508">I had a business trip this week, so I did a bunch of reading.  I finished up The Dragon Factory on Sunday and liked it enough to put all of the other books in the series on my Christmas list.Next up was The Nameless Dead by Paul Johnston, which was interesting enough to hold my attention as I read through it, but it soon became apparent this was the third or fourth book in a continuing series of novels, of which I'd read none previously.  It didn't make it harder to follow - I'll give the author credit that he filled in any missing backstory as we moved along with the plot (a crime writer who'd been brainwashed into attacking the US President (in the previous novel) is trying to find the ones responsible and bring them down, with the help of the FBI) - and the action was pretty good throughout, up until the very end, when a previous plot point (the death of some major "NPCs") that was the driving force behind the protagonist wanting revenge was undone when their deaths turned out to have just been a hoax, which was completely unbelievable.  It's like the author decided he needed a happy ending despite the facts not fitting in (I'm pretty sure I'd be able to successfully tell if that was my wife on the morgue or someone made up to just look like her).  It left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I'll be avoiding his books in future.And then we got to the book I'm currently reading, having gobbled through the first 420 pages yesterday at various airports and on airplanes.  This one is The Athena Factor by W. Michael Gear, and it's been very good thus far: various celebrities have been robbed/attacked and in each case, something seemingly worthless was stolen (Julia Roberts' bedsheets, Mel Gibson's razor) when much more valuable items were there for the taking.  The reason behind it turns out to be an Arab billionaire and his crack team of (kidnapped) geneticists have perfected human cloning and are offering "designer babies" for sale.  (For a mere $100,000, you too can have a perfect clone of Elvis Presley, taken from his DNA after a "retrieval team" broke into Graceland and drilled into Elvis's tomb and corpse, implanted into your womb or the womb of a willing surrogate mother and brought to term.)  Now a disgraced ex-FBI agent is figuring out who's all behind this and how it can be stopped, when there are no laws expressly forbidding it.  (The cloning company, Genesis Athena, is headquartered in Yemen where human cloning isn't illegal, and all procedures are performed on a superyacht in international waters.)  It's been a really good read, and the technological explanations still seem plausible (to an admitted non-expert in human cloning techniques) despite the book having been written in 2005.Johnathan</blockquote>

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