The Extinction Trials

When I first started Extinction Trials the writing and characters led me to expect a long read. The characters told you exactly what they were feeling, instead of trusting you to figure it out, and the plot moved faster than a hyperactive toddler. Luckily once it had got going it settled down into a nice little adventure. It's nothing groundbreaking or original but it's a nice B-Movie book with a satisfying ending.

Preachy Philosophy And Just-Too-Far-Out-There Part V Mar Otherwise Stellar SciFi Novel. Outside of some hyper preachy philosophy in Part IV and a Part V that simply breaks everything previously established and shatters all possible suspension of disbelief, this book was truly a stellar scifi suspense/ action tale. One that should have simply ended with the conclusion of Part IV. You've got elements of Brett Battles' PROJECT EDEN, James Dashner's MAZE RUNNER, THE MATRIX, WATERWORLD , BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, Ted Dekker's CIRCLE QUADRILOGY, and a jump-right-into-the-action opener ala Jeremy Robinson's UNITY or (a bit more precisely) MASS EFFECT 2's opening level. And these are all franchises that I personally LOVE. In other words, if you like scifi at all, this is going to be something you'll want to explore. Even if scifi isn't really your thing, the meat of the story here, of forced proximity creating a family-of-choice, secrets, lies, betrayals, and survival... those are all human elements that Riddle uses effectively to tell his story remarkably well. So well that were it not for the issues noted at the beginning of this review, this is very easily a 5* tale. As is, it is still a mostly solid, action packed book, and still recommended.