AUTHOR Raymond Khoury is a very lucky man. Just as the world starts to collapse into a global financial meltdown and a democratic leader is elected to the White House, his book, The Sign is published.
In fact, there were a number of spots throughout the book that made me wonder if he, or his publisher, had quickly whipped though it and added more relevant content.
Be that as it may, The Sign is a fairly solid action thriller based on a couple of premises:
1.There is technology in the world that we know nothing about;
2.Global warming is worse than we thought and we're all going to be drowned;
3.The mysterious US government is still peppered with nasty 'black ops' people who'll do anything to have their way.
Unfortunately these ideas aren't exactly new, which is why there are times when the reader feels a sense of deja vu – we've got an ex-crim anti-hero, a feisty chick, a couple of manipulative big business types, some soft and squishy religious people and a whole heap of gullible fools.
But, The Sign has the saving grace of some great, tightly written action scenes, some unusual scenery and some cool technology.
Gracie is a TV journalist sent to Antarctica to film the shearing off of a massive ice shelf, part of a story on the rapidly deteriorating climate. While there she experiences a bizarre light show that flashes a mysterious symbol; something that may, or may not, be miraculous.
Before she knows it, Gracie and her crew are winging their way to Egypt to visit a Coptic Christian hermit who has apparently been drawing the symbol for months in his isolated cave.
At the same time, the reader is introduced to Matt Sherwood. A former car thief, Matt has recently discovered that his beloved younger brother, an IT genius, may not actually be dead.
Winding through these two stories – which you just know are going to join up together somehow – are the machinations of Rydell, Drucker and the very nasty piece of work, Maddox.
The 'goodies' go up against the 'badies', who despite their seemingly endless supply of military technology and hard bodies, just can't seem to get it together enough to stop a couple of amateurs from giving them a good kicking.
It is this, more than anything else, which makes The Sign's plot an uncomfortable read. Sure, Matt might have spent some time in a minimum security jail, but that surely didn't train him for hardcore military style ops, did it?
Going from reformed car thief to an urban version of Rambo, literally within pages, is more than a little unbelievable.
Still, this is fiction, and if I can happily believe in zombies, vampires and werewolves while reading, I can suspend my disbelief a bit further for this.
Anyway, as always, the good guys come out on top, but there are some interesting passages that make one think about exactly who's good and who's bad.
Drucker, a politician who has a good idea but a bad way of implementing it, says this:
"We just had eight years of an oil wildcatter I wouldn't even hire to run a car wash, eight years of a guy who thought his instincts were manifestations of God's will, eight years of criminal incompetence and unbridled arrogance that brought our country to its knees, and did we learn anything? Clearly not.
"Hell, it took the economic meltdown of the century to just barely manage to scrape through to this victory...
"Damn near half the country voted for more of the same – or worse. We actually came this close to putting someone who thinks The Flintstones is based on fact, someone who only got a passport a year before the election and who wouldn't take an interview for a month while she was whisked away to be quietly educated about what's happening in the real world, someone who actually thinks she's going to see Jesus Christ again on this earth in her lifetime and who thinks our boys in Iraq are out there doing God's work...
"We actually came this close to putting someone as risibly, absurdly unqualified as that within a 72-year-old cancer-weakened heartbeat of the presidency."
Have a guess who Drucker is talking about. It makes the reader want to start rooting for the 'bad' guys; you can understand their pain.
Which is what lifts The Sign from being an okay airport read to a thriller with something to say and a bit more bite.
Khoury is obviously a writer with a political bent; his author's note at the end of the book includes a number of quotes from Ronald Reagan, Katherine Harris (the woman who bumped Gore from the job because of her religious views), Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin and even Thomas Jefferson.
Each quote makes you wonder why America is still a functioning county and explains why we should be very, very thankful that Barack Obama won.
The Sign by Raymond Khoury is published by Orion Books and is available at good bookstores and online.