Gray Apocalypse
James Murdoch
Reviewed by Tom Morton
Gray Apocalypse, by James Murdoch
(Demand Publications, 2009) is a gripping novel of impending doom and
the
heroes Fate decides to use to prevent it. Evil—well you can’t really
call them
evil since they are emotionally bereft—aliens, known as Breeder Grays,
deflect
an asteroid onto a direct course for the Earth, and it is up to Michael
Kendon,
former assassin, and Eric Teplar, astronomer, to save the day.
Teplar discovers
the immanent collision while showing his observatory to a group of
school
children in Puerto Rico. Luckily, the
children’s teacher
has an uncle who was once abducted by a different group of aliens and
warned of
the disaster. Prior to the asteroid discovery, Teplar finds a dislodged
plate
in the observatory and discovers a lever that when pulled swings the
giant
telescope to one side, while raising a giant hollow cylinder in it’s
place
pointing to the exact location of the incoming projectile. The only
problem was
he did not have sufficient power to arm the supposed weapon.
Kendon, on the other
hand, finds the power source with the help of Laura Meller, whose
father Kendon
was close to. After finding the power cell, and a handy shoulder-fired
weapon
based on alien technology, the two go on a mission to find the weapon
that the
cell powers.
After much action
and more than a few close calls, Kendon and Teplar both discover that
Laura’s
father had been the one to set up the trust that ran the observatory.
When the
two parties meet, they figure out how to arm the weapon and destroy the
incoming asteroid.
There is action,
there is romance, there is a killer-turned-healer, what more could you
ask for
in a book?