Tag: Sigma Force

The Seventh Plague – James Rollins

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The Seventh Plague - James Rollins

Originally Posted July 2017 Revised and Updated April 2026

I do believe that I say this every time I read a new novel by James Rollins. I don’t know why I put off reading James Rollins books! His latest The Seventh Plague has been sitting on my “to be read” pile of library books for more than a month! Mistake! I finished it last night and it was great!

Winning the Battle- Books vs. Other Media

After finishing Charlie Donlea’s last book The Girl Who Was Taken I was reading his biography at his website. In it he writes about what makes a book good enough to win the battle between books and other media alternatives….

….And the answer is

The book has to call me back to it. If a story makes me think about it after I’ve put it down, if it makes me wonder what will happen next, if it makes me ponder where the characters are going and what is in store for them—then, when I’m free and able to spend leisure time on entertainment, hands down I’m reaching for that book before anything else.

 

Well, The Seventh Plague certainly kept calling me back! Typically, as I read a book I read to the end of a chapter and then go do something else. It seemed that every time I got to the end of a chapter in The Seventh P:lague, bam, something happened! And that something made it very hard to put the book down! It always left me feeling, I can’t wait to get back and see what happens!

Book: Edward come back

Me: I’ll be back as soon as possible!!

About The Seventh Plague

So let’s get back to The Seventh Plague. In the book James Rollins  blends a lot of history and science into an action packed compelling story! The story when archaeologist Harold McCabe who has been lost for two years in the desert in Sudan unexpectedly comes stumbling out of the desert. He wants to tell his story. However, he dies before his story is told.  After he dies, the doctors performing the autopsy on his partially mummifid body become ill with a mysterious disease. Soon the  mysterious disease starts to quickly spreads through Cairo.

More people become ill, after McCabe’s body is returned to Britain. A British doctor becomes concerned and calls her friend, Sigma Force director Painter Crowe. She is concerned because the archaeologist Harold McCabe had been searching for proof  that ten plagues of Moses are more than a fable..He believes that they really happened  And as the pandemic spreads the Doctor begins to believe that they may have happened So  the question becomes… can they happen again? The Sigma Forces’ assignment find out what’s happening an stop it. The only problem is that someone may not want them to stop it!!

In the novel, Rollins mixes the lives of  Doctors Stanley and Livingstone, Mark Twain,and Nicholas Tesla(?)  with the plagues of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt ! Oh, there’s even something about elephants thrown into the mix!

If you like action adventure, mixed with history and science coupled with compelling characters look no further  than the Sigma Force novels of James Rollins! Those books don’t only call you back to them. You also learn something from them. Is there anyone who may be more interesting than Nicholas Tesla?  In addition, the members of the Sigma Force and even the villains are great characters who face challenges on a global scale. But they also have lives outside of their work, so they also face the personal challenges of everyday life!

Finally, you can read most of the Rollins novels separately.  But like any series it’s always more fun knowing what has happened to the characters in their prior adventures. But don’t let that stop you. Read The Seventh Plague and then the rest of the books will call you to them

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James Rollins

About James Rollins

James Rollins is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of international thrillers. His writing has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold more than 20 million books. The New York Times says, “Rollins is what you might wind up with if you tossed Michael Crichton and Dan Brown into a particle accelerator together.” NPR calls his work, “Adventurous and enormously engrossing.”

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The 6th Extinction – James Rollins

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The 6th Extinction - James Rollins

Originally posted April 2016 Revised and updated April 2026

I don’t think there are many authors who blend science, history and action together better than James Rollins. I read several of his early stand-alone novels before I read my first Sigma Force novel Map of Bones and since then I don’t think I’ve missed an installment in the series.

One thing I love about James Rollins is that at the end of his books he always discusses the truth or fiction of  the science or history contained in the book,

In the6th Extinction that discussion  covers ten pages! The science discussed ranges from XNA, Jumping genes, De-Extinction, Extremophiles to Antarctic life and geology. While the history discussed includes Darwin’s Voyage on the Beagle and the Germans in Antarctica!….

From Goodreads – The Story

A remote military research station broadcasts a frantic distress call that ends with a chilling message: Kill us all. When soldiers arrive to investigate, they discover everyone in the lab is dead—not just the scientists, but every living thing for fifty square miles is annihilated: every animal, plant, and insect, even bacteria. The land is completely sterile—and the blight is spreading.

To prevent the inevitable, Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma must decipher a threat that rises out of the distant past.  A time, when Antarctica was green and Earth’s life balanced on a knife edge. Following clues from an ancient map rescued from the lost Library of Alexandria, Sigma will make a shocking discovery involving a prehistoric continent, and a new form of death buried under miles of ice. Read More

The Bottom Line:

The 6th Extinction is scary good, because most of the technological stuff is real and it’s scary!! The book gets 4.5 stars out of 5. Next up on the Rollins front is The Bone Labyrinth the latest Sigma Force adventure!

Author’s Website
Facebook
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Goodreads

James Rollins

About James Rollins

James Rollins is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of international thrillers. His writing has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold more than 20 million books. The New York Times says, “Rollins is what you might wind up with if you tossed Michael Crichton and Dan Brown into a particle accelerator together.” NPR calls his work, “Adventurous and enormously engrossing.”

Book 33 for 2013 – James Rollins – The Eye of God!

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The Eye of GodWith all the music listening and writing this week, I totally forgot to write about Book No. 33 of 2013, James Rollins The Eye of God. I have been a fan of Rollins’ Sigma Force novels since I read my first Map of Bones in 2005, and have enjoyed Rollins blending of science, history and of course a lot of action into 9 terrific reads!! It’s interesting as I write this that characters that first appeared in Map of Bones play a central part in this latest novel.

Like Harlan Coban’s Six Years this book is also a quest well actually it is several quests rolled into one action packed story. The most important quest is to find the satellite IoG2 which was studying dark energy surrounding a comet that is approaching the earth. While IOG2 (Eye of God) was preparing to perform and experiment evolving the transfer of dark energy back to its sister satellite IOG the satellite became unsteady and crashed to earth before its crashed pictures of the earth were transfer to the command center where Jada Shaw an astrophysicist  whose theories of dark energy were being proven correct and Director of Sigma Force Painter Crowe were watching. The pictures showed a destroyed eastern coast of the US and more amazingly they were dated four days in the future!! So began Sigma Force’s quest was first to find the satellite whose final resting place was somewhere in Mongolia and then find out what the hell was going to happen and can it be stopped!!

Meanwhile in Italy those characters that previously appeared in Map of Bones Rachael Verona and her Uncle Vigor a priest were about top embark on their quest, which also involved saving the world, but involved another priest Father Josip a priest that Vigor thought was long dead. Josip sends Vigor a skull and the Book of Thomas bound in human skin. The message hidden in these artifacts was clean to Vigor and it pointed to the end of the Earth in FOUR DAYS. So they set off to find Father Josip and a quest which also involves Ghengis Kjan and Attila the Hun!! Mongolian, eh??

And finally former assassin Seichan now in a quasi-relationship with Sigma Force Commander Gray Pierce is on a quest to find Seichan’s long-lost mother. It is a quest that has taken them to the underworld of Macau, China. Only when the trio Seichan, Gray and Kowalski meet an informer who is going to tell Seichan about her mother turns out to be someone who wants to capture and sell Seichan (a large bounty is on her head due to her past) All hell busts loose and Seichan ends up in North Korea and Gray’s quest becomes her rescue!!

Ultimately, as you may have guessed all the quest come together and become a race to save the world from the destruction that was witnessed. The final resolution ties all the threads up in a whirlwind of action.

As always the characters are vividly drawn and while some characters are absent like Monk’s wife Kat and Lisa Painter’s love interest there are new members introduced including the aforementioned Jada Shaw and Duncan Wren who has magnets in his fingers that pick up minuscule oscillations and vibrate in the presence of an electromagnetic field!! and maybe in the presence of dark energy!!

So if you are like me and enjoy books that teach you stuff …. like Attila’s murder, and Genghis Khan’s mother’s birthplace and the quest for Genghis’ tomb, and blends that with cutting edge science and plenty of action, you’ll love The Eye of God… is it a little hard to follow and have a little too much happening maybe, is the action a little over the top with too many bodies, maybe. But the bottom line is that when you turn the last page… you learned something and had a great time doing it!!!

Here’s a cool trailer about the book! And if you’re already a fan of Rollins you can listen to an interview here