The Chimera Vector by Nathan M Farrugia

Published digitally by Momentum (Pan Macmillan Australia) on May 1, 2012

The Chimera Vector is sort of a Jason Bourne story, except this version of Jason is named Sophia. She’s a little more fine-tuned than Bourne, but she’s basically a black ops super-killer whose actions are controlled by something called The Fifth Column, a nickname for “the world’s military-industrial complex.”

After mistaking a civilian family in Iran for enemy soldiers and wiping them out before mistaking some “friendly forces” for terrorists (and wiping them out), Sophia and two Mark I operatives on her Fifth Column team are on the run. The Fifth Column regards them as “defective operatives.” Well, they do seem to be a bit confused. Programming glitch?

While working her way through a standard action plot, Sophia is presented with a plan to end psychopathy through eugenics. The reasoning in support of the plan is shaky -- stopping psychopaths from reproducing won’t produce “a world without evil” since abundant evil is caused by non-psychopaths -- but Sophia is troubled by the moral implications of involuntary gene manipulation for all of five seconds before signing on. Couple that with a genetic enhancement that quadruples lifespans, and you’ve got yourself a muddled plot.

The two genetic plans are at odds with each other since a psychopath who lives to be 350 can do a lot of damage without bothering to reproduce and spread his psychopathic seeds. That tension only contributes to the plot muddle, which occupies the novel’s second half. Rather than trying to make sense of it, the reader can wade through action scene after action scene, during which characters engage in constant banter. Long fights last far too long, and the wisecracking combatants made me think that the fights couldn’t have been nearly as intense as Nathan Farrugia made them out to be. I mean, if you’re making chit-chat while dodging knife thrusts, the knives can’t be all that worrisome.

The Chimera Vector isn’t a bad novel, but after a decent start, it nearly fizzles out. If you research this novel, you’ll find a lot more written about the marketing hype that made the book popular than the novel itself. Kudos to Farrugia for his marketing skill, but this novel didn’t convince me to read the others in the series.

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