Crucible of Time

Back to the original author of the series with this one. As with his others, a lot of time was taken in the redoubt. One of the best scenes was them coming across Mom's Place and the hideous secret there. The mutie rat battles were fun, also. Then they meet up with Joshua Wolfe, a man from Ryan and J.B's past, who has set up a crazy religious commune. The "tests" the group faced were exciting...especially Krysty's against a female giant. Doc was extremely vulnerable in this one, but his scenes of action with the swordstick were effective. All in all, an enjoyable entry.

This last novel written by the original James Axler is a little bit of a disappointment, like the author was running out of ideas, and in my opinion, it was a good thing by this time that the torch was passed to other writers. The familiar writing of the characters was one of the positive things about the novel, but the book in general was... well, general. I found the book started with about as basic as a typical book starts as you can get, nothing much happens, and no new ground is broken. Further along Ryan and his crew come upon a gun loving religious group, and they stay there, and find themselves in a bad situation. The action heats up in the last part of the book, with the adventure moving along quickly, so it was a decent page-turner at this point, but the story itself wasn't all that great, but at least Doc Tanner got some good scenes in toward the end. The Earthquake was a very contrived way of wrapping up the story, this is the kind of thing that bugs me because of the coincidence of a natural disaster hitting at the right place at just the right time. The book has a western flavor to some scenes that James liked to use, and some gory and shocking moments. A plain book overall with enough action in the later part of the book to keep it from being boring, I give it a 5.