Fatal Error
F. Paul WilsonThis riveting supernatural thriller, billed as the penultimate novel in Wilson's long-running Repairman Jack saga (Ground Zero, etc.), finds Jack, a principled mercenary who lives off the grid, still tussling with the evil Order of Septimus, whose members hope to open the door to a malignant occult force known as the Otherness. To do so, they partner with several techno-terrorist cults to shut down the Internet, which further serves the interests of Jack's nemesis, the sinister Mr. Osala, who's grooming a newborn child tainted with the Otherness to play an adversarial role in the events unfolding. Wilson gives his multilayered plot an invigorating aura of cosmic creepiness as he deftly weaves together subplots and themes that have been snaking their way through the past dozen novels. Fans who've been following this series for the past quarter-century will be pleased to find that it still abounds with ingenuity and surprises.
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The next-to-last Repairman Jack novel will be pretty much incomprehensible to anyone who is not intimately familiar with the dozen or so that came before it. A man’s family has been abducted, and the abductor is threatening to kill his captives if the man goes to the authorities. Clearly this is a case for Repairman Jack, a fix-it guy who operates under the legal radar. Unfortunately, Jack is a bit preoccupied with the ongoing battle between good and evil for control of the physical world (Jack, you see, has another gig as protector of the human form of Earth’s consciousness). Wilson brings Jack’s story closer to its resolution, which apparently will involve the fate of humanity itself. Casual readers will almost certainly be baffled, but fans of the Repairman Jack series will be excited about the nearing finale. Wilson knows how to spin a yarn—as long as readers stay up to date with the backstory. --David Pitt