Customer Reviews

Wyrmhole

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

 

 

Jack Stein is a psychic investigator. He receives clues in dreams and visions, then puts them together to solve cases. He has been hired by Outreach Industries to investigate the disappearance of one of their mining crews. Jack lives in an enclosed city called the Locality which has three sections Old, Mid and New. Jack's circumstances have him living in Old, not somewhere you necessarily want to be. Being a psychic investigator doesn't pay well and doesn't garner much respect. Add to that the fact that Jack isn't very good at it.

The deeper Jack gets into his investigation of the missing miners, the more people lie to him and want to hurt him, until he's not sure what the truth is. An old "friend" who he had enlisted to help him gets killed and Jack finds himself taking care of Billie, a clever, smart, but old-before-her-years 12 year old girl who was living with the friend under unsavory circumstances.

Wyrmhole is pretty well written and moves along at a decent pace but ultimately has problems. Jack is not good as an investigator. In fact, I'm not sure he figured any part of it out himself. Someone else was always helping him and pushing him in the right direction. There is also little reason given for you to care about Jack; he's a loser of his own making. When the whole mystery is finally revealed in the end, I was left feeling, 'That was it? That's what took 300 pages to get to?'

This isn't a bad novel and it did keep my interest, but it needed work.

I really like this book, plot was a bit lazy, but the writing style was good. Good character interaction, very good emoting of the central characters. The only thing was that even though he's suppose to be solving things on an unconscious, intuitive level, it does make it seem as if this PI doesn't really solve things so much as been given strategically placed plot movers to make the story progress. Still, this book is more about the journey rather than the end trip. Entertaining just to read and go with it. Like it much better than his 2nd novel in this series.

Jay Caselberg's "Wyrmhole" starts out with a lot of promise: an interesting concept and setting coupled with good, clear writing. But, that promise quickly deteriorates. The further you get into the book, the more you're aware that the main character, a variant of an investigator, has no people skills, no organizational skills, no technical skills, and no INVESTIGATIVE skills. He basically moves through the book by thrashing around and luckily finding others to follow up on the hints he gets from his psychic skills. How we're supposed to believe that he could ever put food on the table as an investigator I don't know. Couple this with a lack of a logical progression through the plot and I can only charitably give it a Pretty Bad 2 stars out of 5.

Reading this book, it's not hard to see what the writer was going for. However, it isn't hard to see that he didn't quite get it, either. The quoted reviews on the book lead one to believe this is a tense thriller, and an intriguing lead-in dangles a promise of delivering. Unfortunately, the story grows ever more flaccid and relies more heavily on hard-boiled cliche to advance the story.

Unlike the masters of the detective genre, the author neglected to weave a cohesive story, or convincing motivations for the various players. Credibility is stretched thin as the author asks us to believe that there is a credible need for psychic detective services for this problem; that those involved in the coverup are dangerous folks, even while they're paying for the investigation and never do more than render the investigator unconscious to keep him from the truth; that the psychic investigator in question is clued in to the answers by visions connected tenuously (at best) and so obtuse as to defy any rational explanation.

The author certainly has some good ideas, but this story certainly wasn't polished enough to warrant publishing in this form.

Jack Stein, Psychic Investigator. It's a great hook, and Caselberg brings in some wonderful ideas over the course of the book.

Stein is hired to investigate the disappearance of a miner. He's also hired to learn more about a lost handipad (PDA) that comes into his possession. Naturally, the cases are related, leading him into a web of business deals and betrayals.

I wanted this book to be more than it was. I never felt all that connected to the protagonist, or to any of the characters, really. The plot also felt a bit forced. Of Stein's psychic abilities, Caselberg writes, "Things didn't happen by chance to Jack Stein. Coincidence was always loaded. Events seemed to coalesce around Jack." Unfortunately, that means the plot relies pretty heavily on these coincidences, which strains the credulity of the reader.

One of the most fascinating concepts for me was the Locality, the self-contained city which constantly rebuilds itself, leaving the old portion to fall into decay and ruin. Thematically, it was a powerful symbol, in addition to being a downright nifty idea. I hope he does more with it in future books.

I did finish the book, and I was relatively satisfied at the end. As a first novel, it's not bad, and Caselberg clearly has a great deal of potential. I just don't think this book completely fulfills that potential.

Jack's supposed to be supernaturally intuitive, but instead he comes off as lazy, unaware, and stupid. Part of this is bad writing; he puts it all together on one page and three pages later, he's putting the very SAME thing together. I don't think he forgot; the writer did. The world around him is full of people with the same short attention span as Jack, too. The setting itself is a lackadaisical world-view made manifest. In the end Jack wants to break out of all that, but he won't; he'll take it with him.

In the distant future, humanity lives in domed areas the size of cities that are bioorganic, self-perpetuating structures. The rich live in the newest areas and the not so wealthy reside in the old section that will disintegrate in a decade or so. Jack Stein, a former black ops agent, works as a physic detective, a person with the gift of psychometry and the ability to find clues in his dreams.

Outreach Industries, a very powerful and wealthy corporation, hires Jack to learn what happened to the miners on Daril III who disappeared without a trace. A lover of one of the lost miner's works in the home office of Outreach. He gives Jack the missing Miner's hand held computer. It is password protected so he goes to someone who can crack the code. When he returns, the person is dead, the eleven-year-old child who was staying there goes home with Jack and the police pay him a visit. There is obviously more going on than some missing miners and the conspiracy of silence coaxes Jack to keep tying to solve the case.

Fans of futuristic crime thrillers like J.D. Robb's Death series will definitely enjoy WYRMHOLE. The protagonist is a complex man who wears blinders until he is forced to take them off and see the world as it really is (sort of like the Matrix but more mental than physical illusion). Once he does that, the audience sees his inner strength and moral compass emerge and appreciate the man he has become. Science fiction fans and readers who like private investigator talesm, especially those who appreciate a strong convergence, will enjoy this futuristic urban noir.

Harriet Klausner

A bewitching read. In WYRMHOLE, Caselberg presents the reader with a human god figure, Van der Stegen, who builds a utopian city, The Locality. He bequeaths to the inhabitants of this city a controlled, fake environment, much like a computerized biosphere. Ceiling panels provide pseudo skies, moon, sun, stars, clouds and rain. The hero, Jack Stein, psychic investigator (PI), lives in the Locality. Van der S has also discovered how to transport matter through wormhole gates. His beautiful daughter, however, is trying to squeeze him out. All good stuff except the reader must spend the entire novel inside the head of PI Jack. That can be a bit of a chore.

One of the characters, an almost twelve year old girl, Billie, a super hacker, is more mature than any of the adults, and, thus, stretches one's credibility. But as screwed up as the adults are, perhaps she can be viewed as a breath of fresh air.

The ambiance is one of film noir, complete with a fake Hollywood set, PI Jack, who begins the story as a wimpy character, having lost hold of his old, violent, military training, is twice beaten to a pulp. Later, amazingly, his skills return and he can kill his opponents with a single blow. PI Jack is concurrently hired by three different parties in this convoluted story. But PI Jack's brilliant resolution of this case not only satisfies two of his three bosses but also allows him to free himself, and Billie, from the "mindless, patterned consumption" of the LocalityÑÑfrom the confines of his own tortured soul. Naturally, PI Jack will become everyman's good guy.