Another hit, and back to back with Lost City as well!

It’s a bonkers plot (aren’t they all?), based around the idea of ‘Nikola Tesla’s doomsday weapons were REAL’ (albeit assigned to a made up Hungarian scientist instead), evil anarchists inadvertently teaming up with the very elite they’re trying to overthrow, and… for some reason throwing mysterious cities and living fossils in for good measure.

The science is… messy at best. There’s a bunch of electromagnetism which they handwave as not directly causing a lot of the issues we see, but rather setting things that could otherwise have happened in motion, but… the sense of scale never quite works. The code work involved in the secret solution to it all is… just not good (it’s barely a code and there’s no way to tell they interpreted it correctly at that). The mammoth parts and new entire-field-of-archeology-upsetting discoveries are… convenient and yet barely make an impact.

Characterwise, ‘Uncle Karl’ here is such a delight. An old soldier trying to do the right thing one last time. He’s a fun contrast to the young action heroes in most of these books.

The action is, for the most part, fine. There’s nothing nearly as spectacular as the castle/island escape scenes from the last book, but there’s a nice sense of tension through this book.

And yet, it’s still a surprisingly good book.

Onward!