James Rollins Black Order

Black Order

James Rollins

Morrow, Jul 2006, $24.95

ISBN 0060763884

In May 1945, though the Nazis military leadership knows the cause is lost, they put up a street by street fight in Breslau, Poland to protect the experiments inside the nearby Wensaslas Mine. There the torturous screams of experimental victims provide the future hope of the Third Reich to come back and eventually win due to Project Chronos led by Doktor Hugo Hirszfeld; all the researchers are dead except Hugo's mixed blooded Jewish daughter Tola for the German scientists were working on a new type of paradoxical physics, quantum mechanics with real human subjects.

Over five decades later, the Third Reich descendents believe the time is right to bring out into the open the results of Project Chronos, a new race of Aryan supermen and superwomen. DOD Sigma Force operatives Painter Crowe and Grayson Pierce must find a way to stop the Neo-Nazis from changing the world order with their laboratory induced expedited evolution, but to succeed strange bedfellows become allies.

This over the top thriller grips readers on two levels: the action-packed adventures that require extraordinary reactions by Sigma Force and the scientific theories behind quantum physics, evolution and intelligent design that seems so apropos in today's world. The storyline never slows down, but any time the plot seems to veer into cartoon, science surfaces to cleverly anchor the tale in reality. James Rollins' eighth Sigma Force thriller is his best to date as the action is enhanced and superseded by the underlying Freudian philosophical question of what makes a god.

Harriet Klausner