The Cassidy Project by Christopher Cartwright

The Cassidy Project by Christopher Cartwright

This is one of the better Sam Reilly novels I’ve read. After providing an historical mystery that always features into the storyline, Cartwright introduces a woman who takes some drugs that helps her go to sleep on her cruise ship only to wake up and discover that absolutely every human being on the vessel has disappeared. It’s a great mystery and it really caught my attention. At the same time, Sam Reilly is responding to a call for help from a group of scientists in Antarctica who have also disappeared. That the two problems will be linked is a certainty, but my interest in this investigation stayed strong for the first half of the novel, and then it turned into more of a James Bond thriller which I also frankly found fascinating. Many of the challenges that Sam and his friend Tom face would feature well on the big screen so long as the budget was big enough to do them justice.

 

If I have a complaint, and I think I do but it’s a very minor one, the big bad guy’s acceptance of the circumstances at the very end of the story bothered me. I realize that he was religiously motivated and that he believed the destruction he was trying to inflict on the billions of people living on the planet would somehow make everyone better off (you know, except for the seven or eight billion who died), but he was just a little too happy and nice at the end for my believability factor. But seriously, that’s a small complaint in a very enjoyable novel. I’m looking forward to reading the next one.