BOOK REVIEW: SANDSTORM BY JAMES ROLLINS

I N C L U D E S  A F F I L I A T E  L I N K S

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Title: Sandstorm
Author: James Rollins
Published: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 572
Rating: 2/5

This is the first book in the Sigma Force series.

Summary:

A mysterious explosion in a museum in London sets off a team of scientists and adventurers to search for a lost city in the Arabian desert, but they're not the only ones interested in this discovery, making it a race to get there first and not get killed on the way.

Review:

I had such high hopes for this book; I thought it was going to be a great action adventure but alas, there were several things going on in this book that made it much less enjoyable than I had hoped.

The book did deliver when it came to the action part; there is a lot of action scenes in here and one might even venture to say there is a bit too much of it. There is also adventure; there are ancient clues and mysterious artefacts and it takes this team all these different places. I thought the descriptions of the settings was particularly well done; it made those parts feel vivid and colorful.

There are what feels like a zillion characters in here though, none of which were particularly well done and most of them felt pretty flat to me. For the most part, we don't really get the time and space to truly get to know them in between all of this action. Two of the male characters also end up being interested in the same woman, which takes up a lot of space in the book and felt like an unnecessary use of time in the story.

Although the mystery is somewhat intriguing, I lost a lot of interest for it as we got further into the book and I think that's simply because the book is just way too long. There is so much action it starts getting in the way of moving forward and it takes forever to get anywhere in here, so by the time we got to the end, I'd lost almost all interest in anything that was going on in here.

I think I would've enjoyed this so much more if we had a smaller cast of characters and the book was about half the size it is, but alas, that's not what this is, so unfortunately I didn't really love this one. 

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