Debbie Wentworth Wilson's Reviews > Eruption

WOW! I can breathe again. Combining the late Michael Crichton and suspense writer extraordinaire James Patterson is like falling from a plane not quite sure that your parachute will open!

John MacGregor, better known as Mac, is a vulcanologist on the Big Island where there's always a little concern that the next eruption will be the BIG ONE. The data that he and his team have been gathering leads him to believe that the eruption just a few days from now will certainly be bigger than the last one. Then the army whisks him away and shows him that the Big One could be deadly for the whole world because someone in the army decades ago decided to store deadly radioactive remains that included a deadly fast-acting herbicide in a tunnel between two volcanoes. (Is there really intelligent life in D.C.? Even in fiction?) If the herbicide gets into the air currents shot into the atmosphere by the volcano, the whole earth will be stripped of plant life, leading to the destruction of all life. What the army has learned relatively recently is that the herbicide also kills people directly, cooking them from the inside out. The canisters have become very fragile with cracks in them so they cannot be moved. especially not in four days' time.

Mac, his team, and Joint Chief Rivers scramble to find a solution to direct the lava away from the tunnel on one side and cities and villages on the other without creating a panic while also dealing with a glory-seeking billionaire, a wealthy volcano chaser and his wife, a botanist who saw the result of the herbicide on a small scale years before, a daredevil pilot, locals who fear the desecration of their ancestors' graves and, of course, the New York Times.

This must be near the top of my favorite Crichton books. The authors have a unique way of dealing with a love triangle, although I liked the scene in another book where an obnoxious, self-important actor who played the president on TV was eaten by cannibals better. The characters are well-drawn with some of them being decidedly unlikeable, others being likeable and heroic, and still others being tragic victims of nature gone wild. Neither the vulcanologists, the general, nor I saw the solution coming.

Those who enjoy thrillers will enjoy this. This is a clean book except for some bad language and some wishful thinking.