2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an excellent sf adventure with great characters, April 17, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Fear of God (Paperback)
(From a review column to appear in Pirate Writings in May of 1999) This is the second book in Chepaitis' Fear series. It continues, at least in character, the story told in the first book, The Fear Principle. You need not have read the first book to understand this one. On the other hand it will also give you more depth of character to have read the first before coming here. It's fifty/fifty, you can decide. Chepaitis writes about the future and her future comes after the world has paid a pretty high price. Seems there was something called the Serials where people just went off on killing sprees, reducing cities to graveyards and producing survivors with some serious PTSD. As a result, a series of planetoids were developed as penal colonies and rehabilitation facilities. Prisoners get taken off the planet and either survive their rehab or not. This is the story of one of the `teachers' of the planetoid, one Jaguar Adams. The book picks up with the capture of the leaders of a cult called the Revelation Sect. It's a big sect and very secretive so that even though the leaders are captured there is much concern about the remaining followers. The head of the sect seems to be a bit nuts and is also being used as a pawn by the Feds. The cult leader gets placed in a virtual reality world and Jaguar gets assigned to do the rehab. Of course nothing is every that simple in a novel and just how things get sticky and then resolved is why you read one. Chepaitis keeps the pace fairly quick in this book and also creates some tension between the main characters. The Revelation Sect and its leaders as well as the causes behind the creation of the Sect also prove quite interesting and pivotal to the plotting. The writing is clear and purposeful and direct. All in all this is a very entertaining read and a worthy follow up to the first book. My sense is that there is still more to come with this series and that Jaguar Adams has not only a lot of her own stuff to work out but a number of adventures yet to experience. If Chepaitis can keep up the quality they will be adventures we will all want to be on. This is fun science fiction with enough oomph to make the whole experience worth pursuing. A captivating and engaging second book.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Fear of God, August 18, 2011
The author does a grand job of building suspense through the last pages.
Jaguar is trained to work with criminals on a penal planetoid. The goal is to discover their deepest fears, make the "patient" confront them and hopefully then begin to rehabilitate them to return to society as a productive citizen. Jaguar is also an empath and she is often able to use her skills to reach the patien" when normal means are ineffective. Because of her success rate, Jaguar's superiors allow her some leeway although the public sentiment does not favor using or even acknowledging empathic skills.
Jaguar is assigned to address the case of Sardis, a cult leader who has already allowed members of her `family' to blow themselves up with bombs on the children. Her superiors have determined that the best way to reach Sardis' fear of God is to place her in a virtual reality (VR) Heaven. Jaguar doesn't like working with religious zealots and she doesn't like working in the VR environment. However one of Jaguar's close friends, Rachel, has been infected with an unknown toxin by Sardis' collaborator, Philo. Getting Sardis to reveal her secrets may be the only chance to save Rachel.
There are a lot of threads in this short but intense story. Sardis is a hard case as she is so lost in her self made delusions. Philo has escaped and has the ability to mold his physical aspect to appear as another person so he is slipping around the system as one guard and then another. One of the FBI agents, Claire, who brought Sardis to the planet is seducing Jaguar's boss, Alex. Meanwhile Claire has secretly, and against Alex's instructions, placed monitors on the VR system. The VR program begins to have problems and Jaguar has to cope with an infuriatingly obscure retrojection version of herself in order to get clues to peeling the layers into Sardis.
This is book two in the Jaguar series. Although it can be read as a stand alone I think you get a better picture of the primary characters and the setting if you read the first book, The Fear Principle. The reader has to wade through a small amount of techno jargon but you can catch the gist an move on with the meat of the story. I really liked how this book reveals more of the complexities of Jaguar's intense personality, as well as the complexities of her relationships with Alex and Rachel. I also appreciated the twists and high level of suspense that kept me moving to find out what happens in Jaguar's race to stop the apocalypse plagues set up by Sardis.
Again, I would like to read more about Jaguar and Alex and I look forward to more books in the series.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An awesome book, December 6, 2000
This review is from: The Fear of God (Paperback)
_The Fear of God_ is the second book in the Dr. Jaguar Addams series. In a penal colony modeled after Toronto, Canada, after an epidemic of serial murders called The Killing Times, Jaguar uses empathic skills to find the root of criminals' fears. This time she must use a virtual simulation of Heaven in order to find the source of a female cult leader's fear before the dispersed cult tries to bring about an apocalypse through particularly frightening methods. There is plenty of character development and a great plot, and I definitely recommend this and the other two books in the series.
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