The Judas Strain
by James Rollins
William Morrow, HK$208
James Rollins, whose 1999 novel Excavation featured an archae-ologist discovering a lost Inca city that contained both fabulous treasures and a curse, is today's Indiana Jones of action-adventure fiction. It's not hard to imagine Rollins at work - pecking away at his keyboard wearing a fedora nudged to a jaunty angle as he gets to the threshold of the denouement, while around him lie scattered notes and artefacts from his latest adventures.
In his seven best-selling novels written since the turn of the millennium, the Californian has taken his increasingly hyperkinetic imagination, outlandish storylines and dodgy science what-ifs to the Arabian Desert, Rome, the Vatican, and the Rhine Valley.
The Judas Strain has the usual two-dimensional characters solving millennia-old mysteries, cheating death and saving the world in, among other locales, Christmas Island, Angkor Wat, Istanbul and Venice. The intrepid Rollins - a cave explorer and scuba-diver when he's not writing - has done his homework, making research trips to most of the locations.
As a result, much of what may seem implausible is loosely fact-based (he expands on the facts and their varying veracities in a highly absorbing author's note at the end of the book).
