Critical Mass

After turning Ann Coulter into a brain-munching alien (2012: THE WAR FOR SOULS), Whitley Strieber delivers a more serious political thriller. CRITICAL MASS starts out slow, then picks up with a terrorist nuclear attack on Las Vegas and a spy-versus-spy marathon. Strieber refuses to play the genre straight, so listeners also hear lectures on the science of radioactivity and the dangers of die-hard loyalty to a single party. Paul Boehmer narrates without much expression. All the dialogue sounds similar, with a slightly higher pitch, inconsistent accents, and long pauses between sentences. Boehmer's delivery of the narrative is clear but perhaps too steady, a style that makes it easy to lose track of the story thread. A novel like this should be read with frenzied energy, not the sound of a weather report. A.Z.W. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

November 3, 2008
In this overheated thriller about nuclear terrorism from bestseller Strieber (2012: The War for Souls
), Jim Deutsch, a CIA contract employee whose expertise is counterproliferation, has the world's fate in his hands as he races to foil the Islamic master-terrorist known as the Madhi. When Deutsch learns that some plutonium has been smuggled over the U.S. border from Mexico, he begins to suspect that America's elaborate homeland security apparatus has been compromised. His valiant efforts, alas, aren't enough to prevent the destruction of Las Vegas. As U.S. president William Fitzgerald ponders whether to launch devastating counterattacks aimed at much of the Muslim world, the tension rises, but the impact is undercut by some uneven prose (“She looked back at him as if from another dimension, her gaze resplendent with the unquenchable hope of youth, her mother's proud lips, determined, supremely confident that her dad was the great man she believed him to be”).