What if the Shadow that destroyed Atlantis 10,000 years ago, comes back to threaten our present world? A war beyond time. An enemy beyond space. A thriller beyond your wildest dreams. Three areas on the Earth’s surface defy explanation: the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea of Japan, and a small region of Cambodia. Inside these realms, planes have disappeared, ships have vanished, and, in Cambodia, an entire civilization has been lost leaving behind Angkor Wat.
In 1945, Training Flight 19 disappears in the Bermuda Triangle. In 1963, the USS Thresher, a nuclear submarine, is lost under unusual circumstances, part of a secret government investigation into mysterious gates.
Near the end of the Vietnam War, Green Beret Eric Dane led a team of operatives deep into Cambodia and encountered a strange fog near the legendary city of Angkor Kol Ker. His entire team disappears, attacked by strange creatures out of the fog. Only Dane survives to return. Now a plane goes down. In the same area Dane lost his team. He’s called back. To find out who is the darkness behind these gates to our planet. What does this Shadow force want? It is a threat that will take on the world’s greatest military forces and defeat them. A power that will overwhelm our science and technology. A merciless enemy that will lead Dane—and the whole planet—into the final desperate battle for survival.
And there you have the blurb of this military science fiction thriller – although it reads far too much like a synopsis to me… It took me a while to get into this story, which has a really old fashioned feel – omniscient viewpoint isn’t my favourite narrative as I feel that the characterisation tends to suffer. In addition at the start, we kept dotting around all over the place as Donegan’s initial info-dump seemed to stretch on forever.
However, once we finally got to the meat of the story, I found it an enjoyable concept and an intriguing take on both the Bermuda Triangle and Chernobyl. Dane was the stand-out character and I felt that if Donegan had pared back some of the other bods that occasionally popped up, the storyline would have been tauter. There were a number of scenes that I felt silted up the narrative flow, rather than driving the plot forward. Having said that, the Cambodian adventure worked very well and the passages in the crashed aircraft as the tension rose were also effective. Once the story finally picked up pace, I began to see why Donegan is a popular author as he certainly cranked up the tension and produced a satisfying conclusion to this particular story arc, while leading onto the next book in this series.
However, a much bigger problem was the number of editing mistakes, including misspelled words, punctuation errors and odd line breaks in places. While I’m aware that the Kindle edition of this book was very cheap, the error-riddled text has contributed to my decision not to go browsing again in the ‘Special Offer’ section. If you can zone out the bloopers, then by all means go for it – however, I can’t. I spend far too much of my life poring over texts looking for such mistakes and to keep tripping over them in a published book was annoyingly distracting and certainly prevented me from completely bonding with the story. Which was a shame, because Donegan’s concept of an alien threat to humankind nested within our far history, while not totally original, deserves better than the sloppy edit it has received.
6/10
Brainfluff 