After hating Bova’s ‘Titan’–what was I thinking going right into another of his novels? It’s the COVER ART damn it! I am such a sucker. And this book is just pure trash. The characters are straight out of an exceptionally bad SyFy movie. I finished the book only because I wanted to convince myself it was consistently boring and stupid. I keep telling myself I will never read Bova again, yet I find myself getting sucked in from cover art, misleading blurbs or my latent desire to commit a form of painfully slow suicide.

The writing is stilted. The characters are cardboard. The treatment of ethnicity is juvenile and insulting (if I read "red man" one more time I will puke). And not to be picky, but if you are going to have characters that are Brazilian, shouldn't they actually speak Portuguese and not Spanish.
The deadly meteor shower is nothing but a bunch of pebbles falling quietly on the ground. The sub-zero temperatures don't matter because the whole Mars team is safely protected. And as for the "Mars" virus, you guessed it—there is none. They get a vitamin deficiency thanks to the lack of brain power on Mars. And, it takes FOREVER (something like 60 pages) for them to finally realize that they have scurvy. The book cover says that at the Grand Canyon of Mars, the team finds the ultimate discovery. What it it? Hell, we don’t know, because the author forgets to tell us. Is it a Martian city? A big friggin odd looking rock cliff? Oh for Christ’s sakes, couldn’t you at least have given us some kind of pay off at the end?

I hereby vow on all that is sacred, and my complete set of ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,’ never to read another book by this author. Until I pick one up at the flea market and find myself seduced like a cheap hooker.