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Critical Mass

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
What would we do if a nuclear weapon were detonated in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. government suddenly disappeared? What would we do if a terrorist organization announced that it had concealed nuclear weapons in every major Western city and then demanded that the entire planet embrace its twisted brand of Muslim fundamentalism?


In Critical Mass, Whitley Strieber explores this unthinkable but real possibility in a furious story that is almost too terrifying to tell. Nuclear interdiction expert James Deutsch and his Muslim wife, Nabila, struggle to stop an impending nuclear attack on a great American city. Along the way, they delve deep into the hidden world of nuclear terrorism and the experts who strive to contain it, and get a compelling look at the titanic battle within Islam over its own future—fundamentalist and rejecting, or compassionate and life-embracing.


Like Strieber's classics Warday and The Coming Global Superstorm, Critical Mass is torn straight from the dark pages of a very dangerous and very possible future.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      After turning Ann Coulter into a brain-munching alien (2012: THE WAR FOR SOULS), Whitley Strieber delivers a more serious political thriller. CRITICAL MASS starts out slow, then picks up with a terrorist nuclear attack on Las Vegas and a spy-versus-spy marathon. Strieber refuses to play the genre straight, so listeners also hear lectures on the science of radioactivity and the dangers of die-hard loyalty to a single party. Paul Boehmer narrates without much expression. All the dialogue sounds similar, with a slightly higher pitch, inconsistent accents, and long pauses between sentences. Boehmer's delivery of the narrative is clear but perhaps too steady, a style that makes it easy to lose track of the story thread. A novel like this should be read with frenzied energy, not the sound of a weather report. A.Z.W. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 3, 2008
      In this overheated thriller about nuclear terrorism from bestseller Strieber (2012: The War for Souls
      ), Jim Deutsch, a CIA contract employee whose expertise is counterproliferation, has the world's fate in his hands as he races to foil the Islamic master-terrorist known as the Madhi. When Deutsch learns that some plutonium has been smuggled over the U.S. border from Mexico, he begins to suspect that America's elaborate homeland security apparatus has been compromised. His valiant efforts, alas, aren't enough to prevent the destruction of Las Vegas. As U.S. president William Fitzgerald ponders whether to launch devastating counterattacks aimed at much of the Muslim world, the tension rises, but the impact is undercut by some uneven prose (“She looked back at him as if from another dimension, her gaze resplendent with the unquenchable hope of youth, her mother's proud lips, determined, supremely confident that her dad was the great man she believed him to be”).

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

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