Customer Reviews

Sequence

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I enjoyed this book very much but thought we had a few too many side trips into Dr. Alex Blake's past and current romantic life. The descriptions, forensics and police and crime scene procedurals were pretty well done.

Dr. Alexandra Blake is in her mid-thirties and has a two-year fellowship at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), a real place by the way. They have a new boss come in, Jack Wiatt who is a military guy who is disappointed he did not get the job as head of the FBI that he wanted. The first thing he does he start trying to make the AFIP more of a forensic investigative unit that the research center they've been. Alex is an M.D. and a Ph.D. and has been investigating the 1918 Spanish flu virus by using a body of a woman that was found well preserved in some permafrost.

However, with a serial killer on the loose killing women around military bases, Alex is soon called in to crime scenes and autopsies and various other forensic investigation processes. As she copes with that and her "real" job, she also meets a Texas congressman that she begins a romantic liaison with. To complicate matters, another murder is committed by the serial killer plus another homicide that is unrelated to the serial killer but very close to Alex and her new lover.

Well-written and pretty exciting. Could be a little faster paced but well done overall.

Some earlier reviewers have criticized the slow pace of this book. Frankly, that in itself does not especially bother me. I've just finished rereading all the Dorothy L. Sayers books and stories about Harriet Vane and, almost peripherally, Lord Peter Wimsey. By current standards, they are glacially slow, but sheer quality more than makes up for leisurely pace.

Other reviewers look askance at Ms. Andrews' habit of using dialog to provide background information. If that were a fatal flaw, then we must toss out the works of everyone from Homer to Aeschylus to Shakespeare to the perpetrators of the latest CSI Oshkosh.

The book has even been criticized for being a not very thrilling thriller and a not very suspenseful suspense story.

There is some truth in each of these criticisms. If fault must be apportioned, then much should go to the editor whom Ms. Andrews names and thanks in her acknowledgments at the end of the novel. That editor should, somewhere between submission and publication, have taken Ms. Andrews aside, sat her down and told her some hard truths about professional pacing and dialog. The printed text, alas, strongly suggests that she did nothing of the kind.

Let me toss in a pet peeve of my own. On the cover of the paperback edition a quotation from a professional reviewer states, "Plenty of excitement for fans of forensic-based thrillers in the Reichs and Cornwell mold." Well, in my opinion, not really. Yes, there certainly is some scientific clue-hunting, but it hardly serves as the central core as it does with Reichs and in the earlier Cornwell books.

If I have been a slightly dismissive of the faults named by others, it is not because I disagree with them. It is because it strikes me that these faults are secondary in nature and arise from a deeper fault. I think this book is not entirely successful because Ms. Andrews has aimed too high rather than too low. I think that into the 310 paperback pages of "Sequence," Ms. Andrews has shoehorned not a single novel, not even two, but at the very least three separate novels--or rather what should have been published as three separate novels after Ms. Andrews had polished her stories and broadened them out so they could stand on their own.

Every mystery novel draws in a series of strings for the purpose of tying them together in a satisfying knot at the end. There are simply too many strings in this book. They include but are not limited to the tough new boss string, the woman in a man's profession string, the line department vs. the politicians string, the insecure woman torn between two lovers string, the other woman string, the public service vs. private profit string, the military vs. civilians string, the old sins generate current pains string, the thrill and drudgery of scientific discovery string, the push-pull on the museum string. Those who have read it will know what I mean when I write that there are too many murders in this book. There are so many strings that Ms. Andrews proved unable to gather them into a single knot, with the consequence that "Sequence" comes to an end at least three times and in three separate chapters.

Now, it seems to me that aiming high by jamming too much stuff into a book is a considerably lesser fault than generating a single inadequate idea and straining to stretch it into novel length. It is a fault that can be overcome by analysis, self-criticism and sheer hard labor at her new craft of wordsmithing fiction.

Where others see faults, I also see potential. On the basis of that potential, I give this book four hopeful stars.

Lori Andrews' debut fiction thriller is a fast-paced and suspenseful page-turner that will please fans of Patricia Cornwall and Kathy Reich.

The main character, Dr. Alexandra Blake, is a geneticist working for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Alex spends her days mapping genetic sequences of deadly viruses in the hope of unlocking their secrets and creating a vaccine to protect soldiers from potential bio weapons.

When a vicious serial killer begins preying on women with political or military connections, Alex's boss orders her to drop her research and take part in a no-holds-barred criminal investigation. With the FBI off the case, and under intense political scrutiny, Alex must help catch the elusive killer before he can strike again. When Alex is drawn to a secretive Congressman whose ex girlfriend just happens to be the current director of the FBI--and whose husband is later found murdered--she finds herself in a dangerous situation with no idea who is trustworthy or who may be hiding a deadly secret.

Sequence features a multi-dimensional main character written by an author who obviously knows the ins and outs of genetic research extremely well. The wickedly devious criminal is spine-chillingly realistic, and the plot is sufficiently full of twists and turns to satisfy any fan of the scientific/forensics thriller genre.

Armchair Interviews says: A well-researched, well-written thriller!

This is a book that doesn't seem to know what genre it wants to be. The story has potential but there is little life in the characters, conversation or plot development. Too much political and scientific detail and a main character who does not ring true.

Geneticist Dr. Alexandra Blake works at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) and no scientist can be as happy as she is with her current assignment. Since they discovered the frozen body of an Inuit women who died from the 1918 Spanish Flu, Alex spends her time mapping out the DNA sequence of the genome of the virus in order to replicate it so a vaccine can be made thus rendering it useless as a bioweapon.

Politics invades AFIP when an outraged Colonel Jack Wyatt, expecting to be the FBI director, is instead named the head of this agency. The FBI ignores difficult criminal cases so Jack takes them on. He especially wants a serial killer, who leaves tattoos on women's breasts stopped as he intends to make the FBI look like idiots. Alex is annoyed that her research slows down because she has to help on the serial killer case using her genetic expertise. However she becomes interested when on another case, the female FBI director, who is her lover's former significant other, is arrested for killing her ex husband, Ale gets involved and almost becomes collateral damage.

Readers who enjoy the works of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs will find SEQUENCE is an exciting tale that compares well to the novels of these great authors though this is Lori Andrews' fiction debut tale. The fascinating story line moves out on several layers starting with what looks like a medical thriller, but spinning into a politically motivated serial killer investigation. The key character is likable and realistic especially as she does not hide her disdain for her new boss, her disappointment with her new assignment and especially her anger. Fans of Scarpetta will appreciate the new kid on the block.

Harriet Klausner

Lori Andrews knows DNA and genetics and the impact it has on our lives. She has been on the front lines of the DNA debate for her entire career, fighting the good fight to tell the world how genetic material can be used and abused. Now, after twelve top-notch non-fiction books, Andrews has penned a dynamite thriller that uses an exciting plot to spread the word even farther about the scary new world of the tiny building blocks of life. The murderer is frightening (one of his methods makes me squirm every time I think of it) the main character is sexy as hell... Take it on the bus, take it the beach, but take it -- the story of "Sequence" and the story of what can be done with your DNA will scare you right out of your jeans!

It's a first novel. It's an OK first novel. And for a first novelist, she's smart. She stuck with an area she knows well. The author is a reknowned lawyer on genetics. She knows what she's writing about. Her main character is a strong, smart and engaging woman. So...

So, it made a good easy read. It wasn't one I couldn't put down, nor one I put down and never wanted to bother finish reading. It was somewhere in the middle, and that's pretty good for a first novel. The real down-sides were it was pretty obvious about mid-way through who the bad guy was - and where that was going to lead. Yes, it has a trite set-up - but then again, so do many very popular authors. Yes, it isn't up to the level of some experienced authors writing - but then again, there are some popular ones around that still have room to sharpen their craft. All in all a pleasant, engaging and informed tale - perfect for the beach.

Ms. Andrews may be a terrific scholar and a terrific writer of non-fiction. But she has a good deal to learn about writing fiction. Other reviewers have commented on the slow pacing. But for me, a bigger issue was the awkwardness of the prose. There is a lot of exposition consisting of characters explaining things to other characters that those other characters would surely know already. The conversations do not ring true. It's one of those books wherein I constantly find myself saying "The author did not know how to do this smoothly". Hopefully Ms. Andrews will improve with experience.

With this book, Andrews helped me to relive fond memories of my youth. I am a native of Washington, DC, and many of the sites and events she writes about in 'Sequence' were a familiar part of my childhood and early adulthood many years ago. The characters are real and believable, and the plot moves right along as the best thrillers do. A truly enjoyable and exciting debut novel. I'm looking forward to Andrews' next one.

Though having published several earlier non-fiction works, this is Andrews's first novel, and I'm afraid it shows. Badly.

Andrews has a first-rate grasp of her setting, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), based in Washington, D.C., and of scientific procedures that in particular deal with genomics. She conveys this well. Her application of this specialty to forensic crime solving was inventive and interesting.

Her lead character, Alexandra Blake, is also interesting and original, a multi-faceted persona who is engaging and winsome.

The problem here is in the presentation. The pacing of this novel is very pedantic, with Alex trudging from staff meeting to gene-sequencing lab to crime scene to trysts with her lovers (yes, more than one) to parties, etc., with no particular emphasis on anything. Everything is treated as being of equal importance, and it's sometimes hard to remember that the spine of the story here is locating and stopping a serial murderer.

Further, at almost exactly the halfway point in the book a "clue" is revealed that - if you have any knowledge of genetics at all - tells you exactly whom the killer must be, and there's no surprise twist at the end on this point; it is who you think it must be.

The bad guys (there are two crimes being solved in the story) aren't in the least threatening, original, or memorable. One of them is almost simply an artifact character, virtually a throw-away. There's not one page of suspense in this novel, at least as far as I could tell. Even the denoument/confrontation scenes were brief and flat, with no sense of peril at all to Alex. There's a whole sub-plot of the Barbara character going undercover that served no point whatsoever, as far as I could tell.

This book had a great deal of potential: an inside look at AFIP, internecine politics, forensic crime solving, anthropological forensics, and others. It ended up totally lost in the woods.

This is a book that screamed for the input of a good editor. It's too bad Minotaur didn't invest a little bit more with Andrews; they could have had another "Silence of the Lambs".

I think my two stars are generous.