ARA Review by M. D. Sanders of E-M-P Honeymoon

[M. D. Sanders]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, E-M-P Honeymoon.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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In E-M-P Honeymoon, a honeymooning woman stumbles upon an apparent terrorist plot, and along with her newlywed cop husband, a couple young women from her senator brother's office, and a C.I.A. agent, plays at being a spy to figure out what's going on while everything continues.

I'll admit I found it an entertaining enough read to kill some time with. The characters aren't bad and their interactions are decently written. However, in the end, I gave it 3 out of 5 stars. In which at 2 stars I would've considered it enjoyable but not enough to finish, where at 4 I would've thought it good enough not only to finish but also to look for others in the series and continue reading if I could get them free via library or Kindle Unlimited.

Now, getting into the reasons:

First impression? Shot. The cover looks like it was made in M.S. Paint, with a cartoonishly modeled spaceship pasted over a generic planet shot. It not only looks unprofessional, but is ultimately barely relevant to what's going on. This is then followed by the difficult to believe coincidence in which the tourist lady who happens to be recently married to a cop and little sister to a senator with connections to the C.I.A. and space force, happens into the building where the terrorists happen to have left the door to their base of operations not only unlocked but also unguarded, and happens to have known of a professor whose hobbies happened to align with what she needed to know to put together that she's stumbled into a possible terrorist hub. Which is then further followed by a chapter of what's basically an expositional T.V. interview from the prior noted professor that reads more like a scientific alarmist P.S.A. than a novel, so as to cue us and the characters into exactly what type of threat they seem to be facing and why it's scary.

Basically, it comes across as a lazy way to write people who have no real business being involved with the situation into being involved with the situation, and reveal things without them having to discover them.

And there's the next big problem: the premise simply isn't all that believable. While it's fun to think about, a handful of what are essentially civilians are not going to be the ones involved with dealing with this type of situation. (Only made worse when at the end, the ultimate outcome has next to nothing to do with their contribution anyhow.) On top of which, while the threat sounds viable from a theoretical scientific standpoint, it would require certain dictatorships have a much higher level of savvy in both technology and subterfuge, and the rest of the world to have a woefully lower level of information gathering competence, than reality would suggest plausible.

There's also the fact that it's unlikely the threat is as viable as pure theoretical science makes it sound. I remember in high school having the use of a nuke in the atmosphere as a step in my plot for world domination. (I was going through a phase. Sue me.) This to say, if a high school student could think of it... an undisclosed number of years ago, it is almost certain the best and brightest have too, and have had as many years to create safeguards against it happening at all, much less being as devastating as imagined if it does.

This being a problem with trying to write speculative fiction about what is effectively a model of the current real world: you can't bend the rules behind it too far or the suspension of disbelief simply breaks.

All that being said, if one ignores the flaws in the premise, the story built around it is well enough written that I did find it enjoyable for the most part. There were just a few too many things that made me side eye or eye roll away from it to bother looking for others. It probably would've been significantly better if the threat had been made on a local scale by a bumbling amateur group, because it really just doesn't make enough sense for the people involved to be involved with the global scale event, or for a fully trained military group capable of avoiding military detection to allow the blatant mistakes that led to the people involved detecting them instead. And they might’ve been able to resolve it with their efforts, instead of having credit be unrelated to such.

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