The Bush League Critic

Debut author Patrick Lee makes a bold entrance with this conspiracy-type thriller featuring ex-cop, ex-con Travis Chase.

The blurb:

Travis Chase, a man putting his life back together after fifteen years in prison, takes a solo hike into the Alaskan Rockies. He's just looking for a quiet place to think about his future, but what he finds is trouble: a 747, downed in remote wilderness, the wreck impossibly undiscovered by authorities. Those aboard are dead, though not because of the crash. They've been shot.

This aircraft, along with the terrifying object it was transporting, is only the beginning for Travis. Within hours he finds himself at the center of a violent conflict that spans the globe, and a secret war that dates back three decades. A war for possession of radically advanced technology—that wasn't created by human hands.

This is one of those novels that is very tightly written: every detail means something - every event, conversation, or action has a purpose that ties in to the overall plot. For this alone, I give Lee an A+... tightly written conspiracy thrillers are some of my favorite reading.

The characters are solid, there are no "lulls" in the narrative, and the dialog is very natural, but... (and it's a big "but")... I just didn't "buy" the ending. For reasons that would spoil elements of the plot for other readers, I can't really go into the details of why I didn't buy it... so there you have it.

Another reason that this novel didn't make it into my "Love it!" category is probably no fault of the author. I just "knew" where everything was headed. Perhaps Patrick Lee and I are wired with the same logic and reasoning chips, because  every clue that he dropped felt like a perfect saucer-pass that always landed right in my wheelhouse. All that was left for me to do was to one-time it into the back of an empty net. Which I did time and time again. It was really rather freaky at times!

It's a great debut novel that I'm sure many will (and should)  love... unless like me, you happen to share the same brain as Patrick Lee. I'll definitely be reading his next novel, if only to verify that the freaky-deaky, vulcan mind-meld thing was just a fluke.