BLOODLINES

BLOODLINE is James Rollins’s eighth Sigma Force novel, and possibly the final summation of their efforts as powers which were unleashed in the last millennium are finally being brought together, and the mysterious strands which have driven our troubled history are revealed to be the work of a continuing conspiracy. Think of the fates weaving their troubled strands, think of the ties which bind us together, think of the straps that will hold us down on the torture table – are they mere metaphors or will they literally have some connection?

 Never mind that, will the Sigma Force ever see what is happening, realise why it is happening, where else is affected, and who else is affected? I think we can take it for granted that this will extend to the highest levels, even if it did not begin with the daughter of the President of the USA being kidnapped off the coast of Somalia. Meanwhile, the “Bloodline” is a literal one – it reaches into fertility clinics in the American heartland where bizarre experiments are being performed, which is unfortunate if you have been sent in undercover and had your disguise fail you because there might, ultimately, be no “you” to come out again.

 Elsewhere, your scientist-philosopher colleagues are parachuting and off-roading about the terrorist camps of East Africa, hunting that missing presidential daughter, wondering why she might put herself in the way of danger when she is in the last stages of pregnancy herself, in each camp each time finding their unknown opposition one step ahead, a goading corpse left behind in the birthing room.

 As with the previous Sigma Force novels, BLOODLINE has strong echoes of paranoid history, with one family fixed at the centre over the ages, and in which certain individuals manage to marry themselves close to the trunk of the family tree. James Rollins does not use a lot of imagery when he writes, but along the way here the villains manage to use robot spiders to defend themselves. Spiders, neurones, multi-dimensional elaborate family trees, even cancers, have unattractive similarities in their shapes, but some other pattern drives on the villains of today – and that is not the double but a triple helix, the artificial spiral which will take life forward in a way not as we know it. That, and absolute power, of course.

 Can the Sigma Force, and their dog, stop them? BLOODLINE has the answer. It has blood to spill, as well.