John Read (7) (1920–2006)

My original The Martian Conspiracy audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

A tragedy strikes California as a piece of NASA engineering crashes down to Earth and John Orville, an engineer at NASA can’t do anything to stop it. He thinks that he’s lost everything too, his child and his wife in the crash. So, he signs up to work as an engineer on Mars. Once he arrives, he starts to notice that things aren’t so much like they seem. Follow John as he tries to show more uncover the real truth about what is really happening on the red planet.

Chris Abell did narration for this, and he does a wonderful job. I really thought that Chris used the perfect voice for Chris, and gave the other characters really believable and well-done voices too. The quality of this recording was perfect, with no noticeable issues.

The Martian Conspiracy started off a little weird. I was trying to figure out why we were in California. But the whole first third of the book is to set the scene for who John is and what his motives are. I actually had to pause the audiobook at one point to make sure that I was actually listening to this book. Funny though, right after I did that a scene took place that changes where we were pretty quickly. With that being said, I don’t think that the beginning was unnecessary, it was just a bit confused when I thought I was reading a book about Mars and it spent a good amount of time NOT on Mars.

After we got to Mars, the action really started to pick up. Part sleuth/mystery and part sci fi thriller – this book has something for a lot of readers. I found myself really enjoying the story and staying up too late to get further into the story.

The story arc and character arcs were really well done too. I enjoyed the progress that each character had throughout and the interaction between them.

Overall, a well done science fiction novel, that really had some thought involved in it. I like the mixture of mystery, science fiction, and thriller. It was something different from the average sci-fi book.

Audiobook was provided for review by the author. show less

Modern day sci-fi pulp. Please recycle.

The plot is pretty straightforward, complete with obvious villains and minimal twists (more like gentle curves) and if you didn't see it coming you clearly haven't watched enough cartoons when you were a kid.

Tossed aside at around 70% in.