Another one bites the dust!
Thanks to William Morrow for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.
DEAD ON ARRIVAL by Matt Richtel (out now!) is an end of the world thriller that you’ll find yourself flipping the pages of – and it’s an #allthebookreviews title!
Check back later for Chandra’s thoughts 🙂
My Thoughts: 3.5/5 stars!
Seeing a book being dubbed a cross between King’s The Stand and Crichton’s Terminal Man. there’s no way that I could pass it up! DEAD ON ARRIVAL by Matt Richtel is another apocalyptic/end of the world thriller. This one is more in the vein of possibility – I’ve noticed that with a lot of more recent apocalyptic novels. What would you do if you got off an airplane to discover everyone on the ground was dead?
Dr. Lyle Martin is on a flight to a desolate airport in Colorado. Upon landing, he realizes that the world outside of their airplane is dead – or at least they appear to be. Dr. Martin is a world class specialist of infectious diseases, so curiosity gets the best of him and ventures out of the plane to do some tests. He learns that those affected aren’t dead, they’re simply nonfunctioning.
What has caused this widespread sickness? Is it terrorists with a biological attack? A natural occurrence? I will say that this book started off great. The pacing is great and Richtel immediately draws you in. I had to know what was happening and more importantly why? There’s not doubt that Richtel is a great writer – I just wasn’t a fan of the ending or some of the back and forth in the timelines. The technology element and it’s causes for this phenomena is very eerie because what he says about how we are with technology now is incredibly accurate.
Overall, this was a great end of the world thriller with some good technological elements. This had great pacing – just don’t go into it expecting something similar to The Stand.
Who knows, maybe I’m just not the biggest fan of the apocalyptic novels (or there have been so many of them), but I loved his writing! Personally, I think having it compared to THE STAND is what set the bar way too high.
–Jess
Jessicamap Reviews 