"The Devil's Eye" by Jack McDevitt... another Alex Benedict novel that is really a Chase Kolpath novel... Alex's beautiful assistant. Good story. I'd read it again.Story: After a vacation on Earth, touring with telepathic aliens, Alex receives a desperate message from a famous horror novelist Vic...
I didn't give the book a rating as I realized that I got several pages into the book that I already read this story. Back in 2004 Jack McDevitt wrote a novella in a compilation of the "Worlds Best Time Travel stories" that was this exact story. The first difference I could see is that the novel...
This was a fun time travel book. Shel's father, a physicist, mysteriously disappears and a strange "qpod" device falls into his hands. But instead of destroying the device as instructed by his father's letter, Shel and his friend Dave set out to look for the missing scientist, by traveling in t...
So the moon landings involved a hoax, but not the one you are thinking of. This mystery story of c. 2020 re-visits the Apollo Missions--just what the heck happened in 1969, anyway? Did Tricky Dick pull another one on us? Aside from the main plot, which I am not revealing, what happens if we do...
The Roadmakers left only ruins behind -- but what magnificent ruins! Their concrete highways still cross the continent. Their cups, combs and jewelry are found in every Illyrian home. They left behind a legend,too -- a hidden sanctuary called Haven, where even now the secrets of their civilizatio...
‘We are alone. That is the verdict, after centuries of Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence missions and space exploration. The only living things in the Universe are found on the Nine Worlds settled from Earth, and the starships that knit them together. Or so it’s believed, until Dr. Kimber...
It turned up in a North Dakota wheat field: a triangle, like a shark's fin, sticking up from the black loam. Tom Lasker did what any farmer would have done. He dug it up. And discovered a boat, made of a fiberglass-like material with an utterly impossible atomic number. What it was doing buried u...
Jack McDevitt is really, really good at two things: first, creating really interesting, intricate scenarios (often involving lost civilizations) and two, scripting tight, compelling plots that function as slow reveals of those scenarios. The more of his novels I read (I'm up to three or four, I t...
This book was, in a word, chaotic. And in a second word, preachy. It's actually very difficult to determine which of those two descriptors was more upsetting, as I went through the book. Around three-quarters of the way through, I had had more than enough, and I only finished reading to give the ...
"Chindi" is the third novel in the Priscilla Hutchins series. The archaeological mysteries continue."Hutch", as her friends call her, is fed up with her career as pilot. She gets all of the blame when things go wrong and none of the credit when things go right. She's been asked by her employer, t...
The archaeological mysteries which were prevalent in the first three books are gone, replaced by a xeno-sociology/rescue mission. A new, thriving medieval civilization has been discovered on the world of Lookout. There's just one catch: an Omega cloud, those mysterious galactic phenomena that att...
This was a very enjoyable, even exciting, sci fi mystery featuring Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath. Alex is a dealer of valuable antiques and Chase is his pilot who helps out around his business. The book takes place some 12 years from when the events in the previous book took place.Sixty years a...
This is the second book in The Academy series and I loved it. Hutch, the space ship pilot from the first novel, is back, a number of years later, still piloting ships around for the Academy.A back plot. An earth-like planet is found and a group of scientists found to explore it, but they're nearl...
Christopher Sim changed mankind's history forever when he forged a rag-tag group of misfits into the weapon that broke the alien Ashiyyur. But now, one man believes Sim was a fraud, and Alex must follow the legend into the heart of the alien galaxy to confront a truth far stranger than any fiction.
Multiple Nebula Award-finalist Jack McDevitt returns to the world of Chindi and Omega-and humanity's struggle with its own existence. To boost waning interest in interstellar travel, a mission is sent into deep space to learn the truth about "moonriders," the strange lights supposedly being seen...
The classic first-contact science fiction novel that launched the career of Jack McDevitt, the national bestselling author of Coming Home. From a remote corner of the galaxy a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular…artificial. It can only be a code. F...
Klein and Terry Carr with my appreciation PROLOGUE “We advise that our patrons not attempt the slopes today, other than the Blue Run. A distinct danger from avalanches is still present throughout the skiing area. It would be prudent to remain in the chalet, or perhaps to consider spending ...
Your mistake is that you assume they j are inevitably the spirits of people who have died. But many things leave a I presence when they have ceased to exist: a childhood home, a lost jacket, a school that has been torn down to make a parking lot. Go back to the street where the home existed, visi...
She was glad the mission had gone well, but she was clearly upset. It was probably guys again. Maureen fell in and out of love regularly. But she wasn’t inclined to relay the details. Hutch recalled how little she’d told her own mother. Remembered how shocked the woman had...
—Alexander Pope, “The Temple of Fame,” 1714 BRAD’S MOMENT WITH the transporter had finally arrived. The evening before the Eden mission was to go out, he was at home with Donna trying to watch Rio Bravo but utterly unable to concentrate on the movie. When the phone rang, Donna picked it up, liste...
I nearly tossed it into the trash with the stacks of other documents, tapes, and assorted flotsam left over from the Project. Had it been cataloged, indexed in some way, I’m sure I would have. But the envelope was blank, save for an eighteen-year-old date scrawled in the l...
John conducted a briefing for the pilots from a conference room at the Department of Transportation. Approximately thirty people were there. The rest of us watched by HV. “Since we don’t know precisely when it will appear,” he said, “we’ll arrive four days early and maintain the search around the...
The reason for that is not ongoing tribal instincts, as some would have it, but the sheer joy of wreaking destruction. The pleasure one gets from building, say, a town hall, does not approach the exhilaration to be had from blowing it apart. I don’t know why that is, nor can I advance an evolutio...
The back room had been reserved for the Astro Society. Approximately twenty people had gathered so far, and they were still drifting in. Sandra Coates recognized him immediately. She was in her thirties, with amiable features, auburn hair, and energetic brown eyes. “Captain Loomis?” she said. “So...
The last one had occurred in 2011, when Barack Obama and his family followed through with their plans to watch the launch of the Endeavour despite receiving news that the mission had been scrubbed because of problems with a heater system. It was, probably, an appropriate conclusion for what some ...