Review: Tides of Fire

Tides of Fire by James Rollins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Seichan largely sat out the last Sigma Force adventure, but that was because Rollins had a lot more personal peril in mind for her in this latest installment. Following multiple lines of narratives throughout the South Seas and Southeast Asia not unlike previous adventure The Judas Strain, this time around, Sigma has to face a string of escalating geological cataclysms throughout the interconnected submarine trenches of the region, from Tonga to New Zealand to Indonesia to China. Naturally, making things worse, a Triad gunfight against a recurring Russian enemy breaks out while Seichan and Gray and friends are visiting with Seichan's mom Guan-yin, the Triad boss - and there happens to be a huge earthquake in Hong Kong, followed by a tsunami.

Inspired, as Rollins says in the author's note at the end, by the movie Krakatoa, East of Java, this book focuses more on the enormous eruption of Tambora in 1815, the Year without a Summer, with the usual historical prologue focusing on a strange phenomenon around the volcano where people's bodies turned to blackened coral. Connecting that phenomenon to some bizarre geological substrata - remnants of the planetoid Theia's collision with the young Earth that birthed the moon, though I'm pretty sure Rollins made a typo saying it was four and a half million years ago, instead of billions - and the Aboriginal Australian stories of the Dreaming and the Rainbow Serpent, with evidence to suggest that perhaps Australia, not Africa, was the origin of the human race all along...it's as head-spinning as Rollins's adventures get, but beware, and I do mean BEWARE, of the weapons-grade cliffhanger at the end.

There's gonna have to be another big team-up for the next one, that's for damn sure.

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