Four Stars at Amazon? What Have Those People Been Smoking!? David Wellington, "Chimera"

1.5 Stars out of 5: Oops!

You really, really want to feel good for Captain Jim Chapel. After all, he's a bona fide hero, having returned from duty in one of our dirty little wars minus his left arm, but he's still in his country's service. You want to feel proud for him… though it's a little hard since he still occasionally wallows in self-pity.

That seems about to change, though, when Chapel is tapped for a super-secret mission by the head of his employer, the DIA (an admiral, not some weenie general). It seems a handful of super-dangerous… criminals? detainees? experiments? have escaped from a super-secret compound hidden deep in the Poconos (is it possible to hide anything in the Poconos? I mean, really…) Now these indefatigable balls of inchoate rage have fanned out across the country looking for a list of eight people. Never mind for now how the DoD (or was it the CIA) got their paws on the list of names.

Chapel immediately sorts the list by location, reasoning that the villains can't fly without ID so they're restricted to land travel. The first name is in NYC - but Chapel is too late, arriving just in time to find the authorities pulling a sheet over the woman's mutilated body as her daughter, Julia Taggart DVM, wails in the parlor.

In quick order, Chapel manages to track down the perpetrator and kill the genetically-modified killing machine, divine that a CIA henchman is following Taggart with murderous intent, and bed the luscious redhead. With a wireless "lifeline" calling herself "Angel" whispering in his ear, Chapel sets off to save the remaining seven on the victim list, figure out who let the dogs out, and figure out what the whole Chimera project was about to begin with. Fortunately, he's equal to the challenge…

The first, but not the last, Jim Chapel "Mission," Chimera features all the many bits required by the less-discerning reader in the self-publishing age. The non-stop action runs almost continuously, stopping only for carnal interludes. Though the multiple adversaries are genetically engineered to ignore pain and see in the dark; among other, less savory characteristics. naturally, the one-armed Chapel is equal to the task of finding and defeating not one but five of them. Yeah, sure… Naturally, there's a deep dark secret buried in the Chimera story - one that is patently obvious immediately upon Wellington's ham-handed insertion of the first clue. This is accompanied by many a hoary modern trope - the hacker turned government security specialist, for instance. All of it is clothed in stilted dialog, indifferent research and unrealistic action (and sex) scenes. This pedestrian twaddle would need to improve by double to be worthy of a sequel.

One main reason it doesn't deserve a second installment is Wellington's inability to write female characters - in particular the roles of Julia Taggart and Angel (secondary characters are a bit better fleshed-out). I find it difficult to believe that any female reader would not be insulted that Taggart is mattress-dancing with a veritable stranger within 18 hours of finding her mother hacked to bits and witnessing her office receptionist murdered in cold blood. Yeah - that certainly makes a woman horny. And the invisible Angel, who calls Chapel "Sweetie"? Give me a break. And give this a wider berth.

On the matter of "indifferent research": the human genome contains about three billion letters. I don't think a pair of scientists, no matter how brilliant, have enough time to write out the whole sequence on yellow tablets within their combined lifetimes: at one letter per second, 24/7/365, that's over 90 years...