Black Order
by James Rollins
Published by William Morrow
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Reviewed by Jeff Foster
James Rollins has done it again, providing another Sigma Force novel that will challenge your brain and cause your adrenal glands to work overtime!
What if the most sinister of technologies spirited out of Nazi Germany had survived--and what was once only an experiment was now perfected into a weapon for which there is no defense--and was in the hands of a shadowy Neo-Nazi organization bent on world domination?
In Black Order, James Rollins latest novel, Grayson Pierce and he fellow operatives of Sigma Force are challenged with that exact problem. In the last days of World War II, we find the Germans desperately trying to preserve their most secret of experiments--The Bell--by sneaking the research out of Germany as the Allies close in for the kill and end the war.
Rollins spins this tale from two separate and apparently divergent points of view. One part of the experiment has been reconstructed deep within the Himalayan Mountains in the shadow of Mount Everest. Here one group has had sporadic success in setting up the process for manipulating human development at the quantum level. Unbeknownst to them, a similar experiment has been set up and has been successfully running in the jungles of South Africa on the secluded estate of an Afrikaner Baldric Wallenburg, his family are the last remnants of Hitler henchman Heinrich Himmler's Black Order.
The locations are as wide and diverse as you would expect with a novel of international intrigue. Sigma Director Painter Crowe is already operating in a remote village in the Himalayas when he becomes affected by a malfunction of the Bell experiment, and is subsequently captured by a group of militaristic German scientists and their mutant security forces.
Pierce and his compatriots, a coarse-mouthed teenager and fellow Sigma operative Monk Kokkalis, find themselves the targets of blond-haired superhuman killers as they follow the path of a valuable bible once owned by Charles Darwin, from Denmark to Germany and ultimately South Africa.
The paths both men follow eventually lead them to the Wallenburg compound.
Armchair Interview says: Hold on for a wild and thrilling climax that will leave you reaching for your heart medicine.