Book Review: Breakthrough

 Breakthrough: The Adventures of Chase Manhattan by Stephen Tremp is a thriller. The backcover blurb is very long, so I’m shortening it here.

A group of graduate students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has stolen a breakthrough in opening and stabilizing Einstein-Rosen Bridges, commonly known as wormholes, that allows them to instantly transport people from one location to another. Their goal is to assassinate any powerful politician and executive controlling the world’s banking system that would use this technology for their own greedy gain rather than the advancement of man.

In south Orange County, California, young Chase Manhattan, part of a new breed of modern-day discovery seekers, seeks to leave behind his life of danger and adventure and settle down as an associate professor of physics at University of California-Irvine. He also desires to build a lasting relationship with a beautiful woman he has not seen since high school….

As the death toll mounts, Chase and his friends must battle this group of misled zealots from M.I.T. on both coasts and in cyberspace in a thrilling, desperate race to determine the outcome of this monumental, once in a millennium discovery that will drastically change life as we know it – for better or worse.

Breakthrough is sort of a scientific James Bond book. Chase Manhattan has money, brains, beautiful evil women who have sex with him, then try to kill him, the martial arts skills and quick thinking to equal his adversaries, and a crew of friends willing to back him up and even go into the fire with him.

You don’t have to worry that you might get lost in the technology of wormholes. Tremp keeps it understandable and since the M.I.T. group has already accomplished transporting through space, there are no long passages explaining Einstein-Rosen Bridges.

Tremp has come up with a new twist on the action-adventure and given this modern-day Bond a team with the expertise to back him up. Chase Manhattan has the knowledge and skills to go up against the M.I.T. gang.

I would have liked more background on Chase and his life as a “discovery-seeker” so I could understand how he came to be so skilled in martial arts, wealthy, and passionate about righting wrong.

Another thing that bothered me is that although I knew this was part of a series (“The Adventures of Chase Manhattan”), I expected it to be a stand-alone within the series, with a beginning and a wrap-up. It is not. It is an installment that continues in the next book.

So, I’ll be looking forward to the next book and finding out how Chase stops the beautiful assassin, kills the main bad guy and then decides what to do with this amazing, yet potentially earth-shattering technology.

Since this is the first in the series, I give Breakthrough a Hel-O!

Breakthrough
ISBN 978-0-595-47400-4 (sc)
ISBN 978-0-595-71070-6 (dj)
ISBN 978-0-595-91677-1 (ebook)
Publisher: iUniverse

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FTC Disclaimer: This book was sent to me by Stephen Tremp, an online friend and the author of Breakthrough. Knowing him as a fellow blogger did not influence my review, nor did the fact that he autographed the book. What did influence me were two of the characters: Chase Manhattan, because he’s rich as all get-out and can afford to rent a plane at the drop of a hat to fly him and his crew across the country and stay in expensive hotels; and Susan, Chase’s girlfriend, whom I wanted to strangle. Chase gets the crap beat out of him by the beautiful assassin with whom he’s spent the night having wild sex, then Susan rushes over to care for him. Grr. Having growled that, my strong feelings about these two characters show that Stephen Tremp did a good job of bringing his characters to life.

Come back tomorrow when Stephen Tremp will be here to talk about Character Arcs.