ARA Review by BRByrd of The Expansion

[BRByrd]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, The Expansion.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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The Expansion is about a project to expand the Panama Canal, making it wider and deeper as to be more accommodating to the larger supertankers of today. Politics and international meddling all get involved, of course, to add intrigue and mystery surrounding a plot to sabotage the Canal renovations and expansion. There's murder, embezzlement, and money secreted away into offshore hiding. The CIA is neck-deep in it all as are the Chinese and the international money grabbers. It loosely follows the involvement of Dr. Max Burns, who ends up as the chief engineer on the expansion project. He's a good guy who's an easy patsy for the bad guys to set up as the fall guy. But he ends up not being such an easy mark after all.

The Expansion is categorized as a thriller and it does have its moments. It isn't a roller coaster of a ride or a tale that grabs you by the gut and pulls you along for a wild ride. It's much more subdued than most thrillers I've read. That's not to say it isn't exciting. As I said, it does have its moments but if you're looking for non-stop thrills and action, this is not the book for you.

The first thing I noticed about The Expansion was the cover's grammatical error. The word expansion is separated as though it were hyphenated in a sentence. The problem is that words split in this manner must be divided by syllables. The title here is not. A nitpick, to be sure, but a glaring nitpick to those of us who pay attention to such things. There are numerous typos throughout the book as well, all of which diminish the professional image for which I assume the author was striving.

Overall, I found The Expansion a decent read. It isn't Tom Clancy-caliber thriller, mystery, and intrigue. Some of it was predictable, such as the beautiful female CIA agent and the prime suspect in the plot to sabotage the canal expansion having a fling in the tropics. The ending was arguably the biggest let-down of all. It simply fell flat. It was abrupt and pretty uneventful. I wasn't left with a sense of closure after reading the last sentence. It was more of an abrupt, "And that's all that happened. The end." sort of ending. Even with a healthy dose of the usual plot twists and turns, the expected tragic childhood backstory, and the predictable resolution tied up in a ho-hum of an ending, The Expansion remains an acceptable distraction if you've got a few hours to kill.

I give the book a rating of 3 out of 5 stars for the reasons stated above. The error on the cover sharpened my awareness of other errors in the text, and the general low-key tone of the writing was a bit of a put-off for me. I think the characters could have been fleshed out a bit more and the action ramped up a bit. Overall, however, reading The Expansion wasn't a waste of time.

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