Customer Reviews

The Breach

5 star:		(108)
4 star:		(43)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I've tried reading thrillers before, but they never really thrilled me. Ticking clock, world's going to end, bulky hero with unlimited martial prowess. Boring.

Then I read The Breach and my concept of thriller was turned on its head. By page 8, Travis Chase stumbles across a downed plane with the First Lady on board. From then on the tension does not stop. There is no dreary exposition, drawn out descriptions, or useless subplots. Places to rest end up being the exact opposite.

At times, I put the book down to just think about how amazing it was. There are scenes I had to process bits at a time so that I was sure to savor every line.

And the action. Thrillers I've read before (and maybe I've just been unlucky, I've only read a few) have basic action. He shot the gun, he dove under the table, etc. The action is this book is so crisp, so visual, it's disturbing. Sometimes very disturbing.

All the high tension cards stack up until the end, when they're blown down in one big twist that will leave you shaking your head and smiling and wishing book 1 would morph into book 2 in your hands.

Patrick Lee's "The Breach" is delightful read, but a hard novel to characterize, combining elements of terrorism, special operations, and "X-Files" type mysteries. However one characterizes it, Lee keeps you on edge as it rips through an intricate plot peopled with characters of genuine complexity. Travis Chase is a former crooked-cop and ex-con. He has turned his back on his former life, and seeks a new one in Alaska, going off into the Alaskan Bush for a summer hike. While camping about 30 miles from the nearest settlement, he hears an unusual sound during a thunderstorm. Further on in his hike, he discovers a crashed unmarked 747. To his amazement, nobody is on the scene after 3 days, which he cannot fathom. Investigating the fuselage leads him to a murdered crew and dead passengers including the First Lady of the United States, who has left a note informing him that hostages have been taken and are being tortured nearby to secure a device of great national import which was on the plane. The note says for him to kill the hostiles and kill the survivors and call a number for help. Satellite phones have been destroyed, so Chase has to improvise, locating the people who caused the crash nearby. He observes a woman and a man being tortured. While the man is executed before he can intervene, Chase has contrived a plausible and clever plan to kill the hostiles, managing to save the woman, who has been severely injured. He knows the hostiles have other reinforcements and a helicopter nearby, but must strike out on a all-terrain vehicle for the nearest settlement with the injured girl. Eluding a helicopter, he manages to reach the village and call in assistance, but is unaware a deadly and literally invisible assassin has been launched to intercept and terminate him and the girl.

Chase proves himself a clever and resourceful foil for the assassins, and is taken prisoner by the organization Tangent after saving the girl. He is taken to a remote and secret base in the Wyoming wilderness where he is made aware of the unbelievable source of amazing technologies such as the invisibility suit. After undergoing a thorough interrogation, he is apprised of the true danger to the globe threatened by a traitor accessing alien technology, who always seems one step ahead of Tangent. Lee tantalizes us with glimpses of Chase's past, while he becomes romantically involved with Paige, the woman he rescued, as he tries to save the world.

Lee expertly weaves the various subplots to an exciting conclusion, which keeps one thinking "what-ifs" long after reading the last page. This is a very plausible and satisfying thriller, and I hope there will be a sequel, because Chase is an excellent protagonist.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

I read this novel while shipboard enroute from the Middle East back towards the Pacific. It was a good read and well written.. at least until the ending which is clearly setting up a series. I didn't appreciate that because it left me unfulfilled and feeling forced to buy his next in the series to get answers to questions left open in the book.

Nonetheless, it was a suspenseful and original thriller that was pretty good for killing transit time aboard ship. I'm not sure I would purchase it had I known that the ending would be a setup for at least one sequel.

Caveat emptor.

This book is suspenseful and exciting, an action novel with a bit of mystery and science fiction thrown in.

Travis Chase finds a plane in pieces in a remote Alaskan countryside. I was immediately drawn into the story as Travis first tries to find out what happened and is then drawn into the situation, trying to discern who is good and bad and what is good and bad...not an easy task, a task that only gets more difficult as the story unfolds. Through many twists and surprises, the story unfolds, the excitement builds until the last surprise at the end.

This was a fun book to read, hard to put down, and impossible to predict. I was a little ambivalent about the ending, but I enjoyed it thoroughly anyway. I would recommend this book as a good read that is hard to put down.

The concept is actually quite an interesting twist on an old cliché: a secret facility deep underground run a pseudo government agency hiding something that could potentially destroy the Earth or save mankind. If it sounds a bit Stargate to you, you're not alone.

The Breach follows the meandering path of a fellow named Travis Chase. He's an ex-cop, ex-convict, and travelling through the Alaskan wilderness wondering what to do with his life when he comes across a downed 747 carrying the body of the first lady of the United States of America. That discovery leads him on a wild goose chase (which the character seems much too willing to go on) during which he rescues a femme fatale named Paige Campbell in an extremely gruesome and gory fashion.

The action has our heroes traipsing across the globe from Canada to Wyoming to Switzerland and back all before culminating in a bloody attempted coup at the secret base (known as Border Town).

Lee's characters (with the exception of Travis) feel like cardboard cutouts. None really approaches human in their level of detail or intensity. Indeed, the character that we're led to believe is the big baddy in this tale of sci-fi and watered-down physics doesn't even make an appearance until the end and then he's not even given a physical description.

Paige is another enigma. She's the leading heroine and can kick behind just as easily as Rambo or the Terminator but her origin makes those skill absurd. She's a college kid who is "drafted" into Tangent by her father--another character we meet once and then never see again, for good reason. There's a vague reference to her joining Spec Ops training but turning a cute coed into a killer warrants more than a paragraph.

Also, I think Lee may have forgotten one of the fundamental tenants of self-editing: Always kill your darlings. He's created several plot bits that work really good on their own (the "invisible assassin" we meet in the beginning, Paige as a kick-ass hottie, possibly Middle Eastern terrorist-torturers, Travis's messed up family and flashbacks) but none of them are ever fully explained nor do they really play a big part in the climax. You could argue that they all paint a little bit of the picture but Lee spends way to much time developing these bits and then pulls the plug on them. The invisible man alone has an entire chapter devoted to him but then is simply killed (it's the suit he's wearing that Lee really needs for his plot).

A good portion of the book could simply be tossed out and you'd get the jist of the story. Indeed, the chunk of the action that happens in Switzerland is completely useless. None of the characters exhibit even the slightest bit of emotional response to what happens there (and it's pretty graphic/traumatic--like on a genocide scale).

All of the romance in the book seems forced, juvenile, and never gets anymore graphic than something you'd see in a PG rated movie. It's so incongruous with the hard R rating on all the gunplay/explosions/torture that it's jarring. If you're going to go to that next level and describe the sound and smells of crushing someone's head with a pry bar, you should really give us more emotion (or even nudity) than a seventh grade school dance.

I can't recommend this book wholeheartedly but I don't feel bad about having drop $7 on it. Also, I did pick up the sequel Ghost Country just so I could see how the rest of this drama played out. I'm hoping the sophmore novel has a little bit more structure and character development.

This technically-oriented sci-fi story snaps, crackles, and pulls you along wonderfully for about 80% of its length, then drops you like a stone. The REALLY interesting stuff is part of an entirely different story, a (probably much more interesting) story that's not even told, at all. Everything I wanted to learn about happens "off-screen"--only alluded to in this mad dash to save the world. Not to give away too much, but this story isn't about alien technology, and that's the biggest disappointment of all.

Patrick Lee is a good writer, and knows how to tell a story. No denying that. His plotting and characterization are decent, but at times does try to be a bit too clever with the plot. His real failing, and it's a subjective one, is in not recognizing that when there is more than one story to tell, a writer needs to pick the best one. He doesn't tell what, for me, would have been the far more interesting story; the one about how the protagonist put everything into motion. The untold "origins" story would have been harder, technically, but ultimately more satisfying. In fact, there are three stories in all, and they could have all been told with less emphasis on the worldwide race to find and stop the "bad guys" that was chosen. I'm not saying The Breach isn't a compelling read--it's all that--it just doesn't leave me wanting to read more. (The protagonist goes on to star in other stories by this author.)

Why did I give this 3 stars? Because technically it's well done, and the characters are reasonably interesting, even if we don't get to know enough about them (hence my comments about the author missing the more interesting story not told). If it hadn't been well-written, I would have given 1 or 2 stars and probably had less to say.

For a debut this is good. I kept turning the pages. My interest was maintained. I wanted to see how it came out. That's it for the praise.

Over and over again my suspension of disbelief was assaulted by "I can't believe ANYBODY would do that" or "Nobody could be that stupid" or "that would never happen in this or any other universe".

Now this is a thriller with heavy SF elements. It's beach or airport reading. I'm not holding it to a high standard. But it insults me with it's low standards. I'll give one example - I could give dozens just as bad or worse.

In chapter 4 the protagonist finds a note. The writer was gut-shot by a high-powered rifle and left this note as posthumous instructions to whoever found it. You'd expect a line or two. Maybe call this number, ask for help. This note had that AND left lat and long co-ordinates to 4 decimal places, detailed instructions on where to find the arms vault, the combination to that vault and more for 2 pages. Before writing the note the victim had attempted to repair a sat phone. While SHOT IN THE GUT.

I DON'T BUY IT. And there are dozens of other things happening that are just not credible.

I'm not referring to the fantastic elements (the breach and the artifacts and all that). That's the basic background and I'll accept that - but there are limits.

In spite of all that, I was still fascinated by the story. I was intending to give this 3 stars. But the ending was weak and rushed and dragged it down to 2 star territory.

I compliment Pat Lee on a decent first publication and, assuming that he improves, I want to see more thrillers from him. He has some big ideas and I want to see what he comes up with. (but please don't do a sequel to this!)

I recently selected Patrick Lee's new novel, "Deep Sky" from Amazon's Vine program, based of course, on Amazon's description. When it arrived and I looked at it, I realized that it was the final novel in a trilogy. Arghh! Thanks for the warning, Amazon! But after reading a few pages, and trolling for reviews of the earlier books "The Breach" and "Ghost Country", each of which garnered an unusually large number of every positive reviews, I sighed and downloaded the first novel, "The Breach".

I am happy to report (now that I am nearly halfway through "Ghost Country"), that the download was a great move. "The Breach" is a fun, fast-paced read combining a solid SF premise/mystery with action and a little romance. Our hero, Travis Chase, is an ex-cop, recently released from a lengthy prison term for murder. His backstory is revealed in several brief flashback interludes along the way. Our co-hero, or heroine as it sort of had to be, is Paige Campbell, who is rescued by Travis from certain death early in the novel. The principal SF MacGuffin is of course, the Breach itself. The Breach is a kind of wormhole that resulted from the one and only run of a large particle collider in 1978. However, exactly what the Breach really is is not clear - perhaps it will be resolved later on. But all of this comes together nicely to form an interesting page-turner. There is an ending that is enough of a resolution so that the reader will not feel cheated if he decides to stop there, but it is also clear that there is at least one sequel in the works.

The writing from first time author Lee is smooth and polished, and has none of the flaws that plague many or most of the SF, horror and fantasy from new authors that I read (usually for a buck or two on my Kindle). In my opinion the high praise heaped on The Breach is not just hype but well deserved. Enough so that my "free" new book from Amazon Vine has now cost me about $16 for the two preceding entries in the series. But I'm not complaining. I'm glad I ran into Patrick Lee. I'll let you know how "Deep Sky" turns out when I finish it, right after "Ghost Country".

Highly Recommended.

JM Tepper

My pet peeve with a lot of authors is their action scenes. Too often the timing is off, the physics are off, the dialog is off (WHAT dialog, you're in the middle of a gun battle!) Patrick Lee describes desperate action that takes place in a matter of seconds. There are realistic outcomes... not movie action, but real-world action. A great strength of the book.

As far as suspension of disbelief, as soon as I reset from "Tom Clancy" mode to "Dean Koontz" mode, I was OK with the sci-fi premise. As far as the plot he really kept me guessing, and I'm a guy who sees twists a mile off. Once you accept the crazy setup everything followed with fairly rigorous logic. I greatly respected what was very obviously a carefully re-drafted and well edited novel. And a first novel at that. Bless Lee's English teachers or his natural talent.

There is a weakness (no spoilers) in that there seems to be no aftermath or consequences to what happens in Switzerland. Still, the book is so so so good that it does not knock it off the 5-star pedestal.

I read the sequel, Ghost Country, and... 5 stars again.

With debut novelist Patrick Lee's "The Breach," once you get past the improbability of 12 passengers surviving a 747 crash landing in the wilds of Alaska--only to be executed--the plot takes on plausibility, if you believe in other-world creations. With whimsical imaginations, Patrick Lee takes elements of science fiction and incorporates them into perhaps a new genre: techno fantasy thriller.

"There's a resistance, right at the mouth of the tunnel. When you try to push something through, the resistance pushes back. [Dr. Fagan has] done the most work studying the resistance force. She wants to break through it, find a way to contact whoever's on the other side of the Breach."

Protagonist Travis Chase is "A man whose moral compass points wherever the hell he wants it to." An ex cop and more recently an ex con, he is a lost soul, seeking to find life's purpose at a solitary campsite in the mountains near Fairbanks. During the night, a storm disguises sounds of the distant airliner crash near Travis's camp. On Travis's road to self discovery, the author paves over plot holes with phantasmagoric creations.

At the bottom of a 51-story underground laboratory in eastern Wyoming, an opening into another realm is called the Breach, "the strangest thing in the world. It's a source. A technology source." The moniker is given by scientists in a group dubbed Tangent, with connections to the White House. And one of those aboard the doomed 747 is First Lady, Ellen Garner, who was transporting a mysterious object called the Whisper. Tangent scientists Paige Campbell and her father are the only two not killed, but are being tortured by a group of diabolical men led by Aaron Pilgrim, to learn where Paige hid the Whisper.

As in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, many are summoned but the Whisper chooses only one---Travis. The Whisper has the ability to repeatedly alter history, unable to get it right the first time. It is a cue-ball-sized oracle that came from the Breach and pulsates with blue light. When holding it, Paige tells Travis, "Just let go of it as soon as you can. If you wait too long, it won't let you." Not unlike the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Whisper imparts phenomenal knowledge for many---and causes world-destroying rage in others. And those with diabolical aspirations covet it. Gratuitous violence and countless bodies pile up in Switzerland, as Paige and Travis try to defuse what they think is a nuclear warhead poised to explode with the slightest vibration.

Similar to The Time Machine, objects enter the Breach and return years before the present, and history---and the future---keep being altered. The Breach also produces hundreds of fantastic technological advances such as Medic (similar to the instant healer used by Star Trek's "Bones" McCoy ), Ares, and Jump Cut, which erases memory of the past three days. For those with Spock-like logic, a "transparency suit" reminiscent of The Invisible Man will cause raised eyebrows. But it's what Paige tells Travis about the Doubler (a device that clones objects) that knits eyebrows: "It's against the rules to double human bodies, you know."

With time travel made evident, Travis ponders "the grandfather syndrome," where one going back in time kills a forebearer and then questions if her or his own existence would come to be. Contemplating his place in history when the Whisper tells him how he will evolve years later, Travis possesses secrets of the universe---and takes the high road to a surprise ending.

Gratuitous profanity used by scientists and in third-person narrative detract from a plausible plot, for those who enjoy non-standard thrillers. However, choice four-letter, multi-meaning suggestive expletives can be expected from dastardly thugs. And perhaps Travis, after being locked in a federal penitentiary for years, could be expected to let an expletive slip during afternoon tea.

---Reviewed by L. Dean Murphy