Customer Reviews

Days of Atonement

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I didn't expect to like this book. In fact, I left it sitting on my pile for months before I gave it a chance. An unlikely combination of police procedural and hard science fiction, this novel somehow manages to pull it all together perfectly, making it one of Williams' best (which is saying a lot). Try it

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Just a quick heads-up re this excellent New Mexico political/police-procedural/SF thriller, which I just reread.

It's a terrific page-turner -- kept me up til the small hours. I enjoyed it more the second time than the first -- I hadn't remembered it as being so good, and put it on the reread pile after someone online commented on how good the book is.

This is as good a portrayal of red rage as you're likely to see anywhere.

There are nits to pick -- a 3 digit code to unlock the heavies' Uzis! -- but they won't bother you during the read.

This was WJW's "crossover" novel before The Rift, and it's a far, far better book -- one of his best. Don't miss. Out of print, but readily available.

Happy reading--
Pete Tillman

Remember the small town cop from the first Rambo movie, First Blood? He's a good comparison of our main character, Loren Hawn, the small town, good ole boy, sheriff who gets things done, even if he has to break a few laws to do it.

He loves his family, his town, his way of life.

But forces come into play that try to upset everything.

Drug dealers, local teen hoodlums, mean drunks, crazy street people, eco-terrorists all turn on Loren and try to change his town and the people he has sworn to protect.

Then there is the strange goings on at the new local Physics lab. William Patience, Hawn's nemesis, is the head of security of the lab and does everything by the book, his book, that is.

On top of all the other problems for Loren there is the Murder. The recent murder of someone who died in a car wreck 20 years before. And Loren is sure Patience and his lab are somehow mixed up in it.

As Loren tries to find the killer many of the towns dark secrets are pushed out into the light. And his hard-knock methods cause his friends to turn on him.

But that's alright, Loren gets things done anyway as he sets out to right wrongs because he is the Sword and Arm of the Lord!

This book shows Walter Jon Williams' versatility as a writer. Although it has Sci-Fi and cyberpunk elements, it's really nothing like my other two favorite books of his, Voice of the Whirlwind, and Hardwired.

If you are fans of those works, be ready for a change of direction.

A fantastic story of one man's fight for what he thinks is right!Days of Atonement

Williams is an excellent _writer_, and this book demonstrates his skill in constructing settings and characters. Unfortunately, he wasn't going anywhere interesting with them this time.

I should start by noting that this is SF in the same sense that _Smilla's_Sense_Of_Snow_ is SF; the plot eventually hinges on an SFnal concept, but that's almost incidental. So is the "police prodcedural" element.

The book is really a character study of a small-town cop. He's a rather unsympathetic character to begin with, and there's almost zero character growth in the usual over the course of the story; Williams leaves him, if anything, more self-centered than at the story's beginning. The closest parallel I can think of is the film _Taxi_Driver_, which I've always described as being about an idiot who couldn't even get the die-a-hero routine right.

It's a tribute to the writing that I finished the book. But I don't like unlevened antiheroes, and that's what we've got here in spades. Not quite a waste of my money, but I'm very glad I bought it used and I'll happily toss it into the "if you want it, take it" pile.

I guess the lesson is that I'll have to be more careful about which Williams books I pick up in the future. A pity.

We see Days of Atonement's story through the eyes of the main character, who is a passionate, principled man who is also deeply flawed, deep in denial, and full of rage. His capacity for sudden violence is incredible, and he regularly crosses lines--yet he also cares deeply about order and tradition and community. He actively pursues goodness and redemption in his religion, family, and police work while he is at the same time immersed in a system of casual corruption. The complexity and inherent tensions in this main character forms the gravitational center of this excellent novel, the first I've read by Walter Jon Williams.

Williams masterfully builds the setting of the small New Mexico town and its inhabitants, its history, traditions, and hidden iniquities. The setting is essential to the drama of the story and the motivations of the character, and I found all of it plenty interesting myself. It might be too much setting, background, and character development for someone who is more interested in the speculative ideas, but without this immersion in this tiny town and its inhabitants, we wouldn't understand this character. And many elements important to the plot would have seemed contrived.

Williams knows exactly what he's doing. The technical aspects of the writing and plotting are solid, and the dramatic tension was pretty intense for me. At the same time, the story arises very organically out of this very powerful and complex main character. Williams is steering this thing, but this character drives it.

I suspect that if this book does not satisfy everyone, the dissatisfaction will in some way arise from the way Williams has mixed genres. Personally, I like the mix Williams has achieved between a mystery novel and a science fiction novel, but when you have such a potent mix, it can confound expectations that regular readers of one genre or another tend to develop.

At its heart, this novel is a police procedural, and a good one, but it doesn't really end like one--because it's not *just* a police procedural. Days of Atonement is also legitimately a science fiction novel, because essential elements of the plot depend on scientific/speculative ideas; the way the plot resolves is driven not only by the characters but the science fictional ideas as well. The beginning of the book might seem tedious to some sf readers, and the end of the book might seem a little wild for some mystery readers.

After reading Days of Atonement, I'll be reading more of Mr. Williams's work myself.

Seemed like a slow-starting neo-Western novel for a while. Not a lot of science, and not even all that fictional. Built smoothly toward a stunning climax, pivoting on very plausible physics, and almost mystical "new daybreak" denouement. Truly cinematographic writing; dozens of clear images remain when the words are gone. One of those novels I had to re-read almost immediately.

For fans of helicopters, Vietnam tales or stories where loners find themselves reborn in very different (but perhaps karmically "correct") circumstances, I recommend Layne Heath's novel CW2. Certain similarities are so striking that one wonders if WJW might have read CW2 before writing this one.

sooo.... great read, found it on the shelf at my forward operating base back in 2007, and it kept me entertained for a few days. the plot was great, lots of interesting turns, and I love the characters, particularly the ATL head of security..he's a pretty accurate representation of an SF washout if I've ever seen one. now as far as the Large Hadron Collider in the story, CERN just released some interesting info that suggests there may be some truth to the book's time travelling cows and people: They're detecting temporal distortions around the LHC, and found a piece of breadcrumb buried deep in the machine last year... you could write that off as a clumsy frenchman doing a working lunch... or consider that the physicists in charge of the machine are claiming it was somehow placed there in the manner that the cows, and eventually Loren were in the book.... food for thought. look it up on CNN after you read the book.

I read this book about 10 years ago when I was getting into the sci-fi genre and have loved it ever since. Like more than a few of Williams books, it does start a little slow, but has a great build up to a very pleasing, if a little sad, end.

A wonderful and exciting novel with a lot of surprises. Hard SF meets the Southwest Law and Williams makes it interesting all the way through.

This is not as exciting as Walter John Williams' more outrageous far-future space opera, and no where near as good as the more cyberpunkish Hardwired; it does read more like a police procedural equipped with sci fi style stock characters. And of course, time travel. Near-future stuff like this doesn't age well--I particularly liked the scene where the scientist asks the policeman "do you know how to use a mouse?" but this does flow fairly well, and has its heart in the right place. A must for Williams fans anyway.