The Last Plague by G. Page

Writing a good review is quite often an easy, fun task. If a book moves you, it’s painless to gush about how deep the characters are, or how the author did a great job researching a given subject. Sometimes however, you don’t connect with a book, and are left holding the bag when it comes to a review. That can leave you in an awkward place if you promise your wife a review for her book review site.

I’ll be honest – I didn’t connect with The Last Plague. It’s not that the book was necessarily bad, it just wasn’t my thing. To start with, it seemed to jump into the middle of the story, leaving me with a feeling of disorientation, but that was relatively minor overall. One of my largest complaints was the attempt at secrecy, mystery and suspense. It was hard to gauge the relationships between the characters for the first 200 pages. Without knowing their motivations, abilities, or alliances, it was difficult to remember who did what. This really comes into play when you look at the cast of characters – if I was to venture a guess, I’d say there were 15-20 characters introduced in a short time. Some were quickly killed off, some had similar names (Cerces and Cresta, a couple), and others had names bordering on, well… lame (Indian, a Native American; Disciple, a follower of Jesus). It makes it hard to take a character like Indian serious when a name like “Daniel” or even “Tasselhoff” would have fit better.

The book also had strong religious overtones. While that doesn’t bother me per se, a requisite for following the relationships of the cast is a thorough grasp of who begot who as well as a strong knowledge of Jesus’ disciples. I felt as if I should have read the New Testament as a warm-up. That coupled with the fact that I’ll guess some parts are fictional, leads me to wonder what is embellishment of history and what is not.

Anyways, I would tell you about the plot, but one of the obvious points of the book is secrecy – so much so that only on the last 2 pages of The Last Plague will you understand the relationships of several characters. Some of the plot resolves around conspiracies with the Mossad, the Nazis, the US Military and Covert Ops, the origin of the AIDS virus (HIV) and Jesus. It should also be mentioned that this was the first book of a larger series; if this book was smushed together with the second and possibly third books, it would probably be better simply because it wouldn’t feel so incomplete.

Now, I do have to give Dr. Page (yes, the author is a doctor, which it shows in two of the main characters, who are also doctors) credit. He managed to write this book while practicing medicine and raising 9 kids – yes, count them, 9 kids. I have a hard time even reading a book with just one! I also have to admit some guilt to giving a negative review to a newbie author – I’m also working on a book and will openly admit that the first draft sucked pretty bad (she wouldn’t say it, but Jackie thought it was pretty much unreadable in that state). I will say that reading The Last Plague gave me some perspective on writing my own and I even noticed some of my own pitfalls that I hadn’t recognized.

If you’re into religious-type fiction (think Da Vinci Code), you may like this book. I came into the book expecting something more scientific (a doctor writes a book about a plague), so it didn’t meet the expectations I had. I hope you like it better than I did.

And by the way Dr. Page, when I release my book, please please please feel free to trash it and resolve the karmic imbalance.

Also reviewed by:
Urban Fantasy Land
Genre Go Round Reviews
Realms of Speculative Fiction
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The Full Review
Puss Reboots
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