Rollins Rolls out his Series for Dog-Lovers: "Kill Switch"

Kill Switch - James Rollins (and Grant Blackwood)

Tucker Wayne left Afghanistan and the Army Rangers with mad skillz, a best friend and a wee touch of PTSD. Once the pair mustered out together, Tucker and his Belgian Malinois, Kane, became freelancers; although they were apparently on speed dial for Sigma Force. That’s how Tucker and Kane ended up with a “simple” job, helping a paranoid Russian scientist sneak out of his homeland. 

Of course, “simple jobs” never are… Tucker soon learned that the big-dome was being pursued by the most fearsome group in the Russian military, assisted by an elite mercenary team who somehow managed to immediately zero in on the ex-soldier and his trusty companion. And once he actually made contact with the eccentric gentlemen, his demands further complicated matters – “I cannot leave without my daughter!”


That’s how Tucker, Kane, and three Russian scientists found themselves sneaking across the country in planes, trains and submarines – all the while barely a step ahead of a ruthless enemy. But why? For LUCA – plant life that held the capability of being the scariest weapon or the greatest boon to mankind. And which it would be depended on who found it first; and whether or not there was a Kill Switch.

From the word farm of best-selling author James Rollins (and from the word processor of also-ran Grant Blackwood) comes the first thriller in what the “author” promises to be a series featuring Tucker and Kane, a boy and his dog. Leaping with both feet on the K9 team bandwagon (others have been there before, all the way back to WW2, guys), Rollins and Blackwood have constructed a run-of-the-mill, by-the-numbers thriller barely distinguishable from hundreds of other “man of action” thrillers featuring former Army Rangers and differing mainly in the type of macguffin.

For Kill Switch, the macguffin of the day is an imaginary life form that’s the vegetative equivalent of stem cells, able to “hijack nearby plant cells and modify them to match its own.” The secondary macguffin is the kill switch, something that can stop this life form in its tracks if it ever gets loose – or is set loose by evil geniuses. Of course, the bad guys don’t care about an off switch, so it’s vital that the good guys find it. No problem with willing suspense of disbelief here; it’s actually a fairly interesting concept around which to build the plot.

Where willing suspense ends is that this LUCA has been here on the planet, semi-dormant, for 700,000,000 years – in a cave; deep within a mountain range. No guys, sorry: no cave has ever lasted 10,000,000 years, much less seventy times that. Not to mention that sandstone caves are not only rare, they’re even more fragile than the much more common limestone caves. Not to mention that mountain ranges are eroded flat over that kind of time. Not to mention…

But we’ll dispense with the failure of disbelief for now. Where Kill Switch fails isn’t in details that most people would never notice, it’s in execution. Simply put, the novel is little more than a series of semi-believable action scenes strung together with brief bits of filler. Much of the action is derivative; and the author’s insistence on inserting beautiful deadly women becomes irksome immediately. The disembodied voice of “Harper” – who seems to have a helluva lot more authority, not to mention knowledge, than a handler should have – is a tired plot device as well. And like tired plot devices everywhere, Harper’s appearance when she shows up in the final reel is as predictable as the winning team in a Denver Broncos Super Bowl appearance.

Like many modern thrillers, the globetrotting protagonists seem to choose their next location based as much on where the author wants to vacation (tax-deductible) as anything else. Volgograd, the Caspian Sea, South Africa, the Great Karas Mountains – tourist destinations all… of course, the book does have a few some redeeming features, chief among which is the connection between man and dog (though cat-lovers just might not get it). Even that bit has been done before and done better – one recent, clearly superior version of the story is Suspect, from Robert Crais. 

Since Rollins is now trading on his reputation and farming out the actual writing (like James Patterson before him), expect this one and further installments in the series to a) be just as bland and b) sell like hotcakes. Like Abe Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time…”