Legend: An Event Group Thriller

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 352 pages
• Published by: Thomas Dunne Books August 21, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0312352638
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0312352639
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Golemon's second thriller fails to deliver on the promise of his first, Event (2006), which introduced the exploits of a supersecret U.S. government agency, the Event Group. The author, a former U.S. Army Special Ops member, draws the reader in with an intriguing prologue: in 1534, explorer Francisco Pizarro and his men, in their search for El Dorado, encounter a vicious creature determined to guard the legendary treasure trove; in 1876, at Custer's last stand, Capt. Myles Keogh takes to his death a secret from hundreds of years in the past. In the present day, the intrepid men and women of the Event Group follow the trail of Pizarro's expedition in an effort both to find the lost Incan gold Pizarro was seeking and to rescue the U.S. president's daughter, who has disappeared while on the same quest. A shortage of well-developed characters and plausible scientific speculation, however, makes this a less satisfying adventure than its predecessor. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
Go down a river of no return, toward a fateful meeting with an animal that predates mankind’s existence by ninety million years---after a treasure that has captured man’s desires for centuries. This is what Legends are made of.
 
The year 1533: Sent by Francisco Pizarro, Captain Hernando Padilla and his small Spanish expedition found the legend that men had only dared to whisper. In a lost valley deep in Brazil, he discovered what had driven men of greatness into sheer madness: El Dorado, the largest gold deposit in the world, hidden away from the march of time, preserved as the pristine Eden of wondrous sights and forgotten people.
 
But what he found wasn’t just gold.
 
Instead, Padilla and his crew awakened a devil hidden in the lost valley, a beast of the Amazon who rises from the mother of all waters to viciously kill any who threaten the secret of the long-vanished Incas. But one soldier survives the bloody savagery and, before dying, shares his story with a lone priest in Peru. A secret the Vatican quickly buried away.
 
The Present: Professor Helen Zachary is searching for a hidden legend, buried deep within the Amazon Basin---a great beast who has survived there since the dawn of time, a being ready to plunge modern science into a world of darkness. And into this darkness, Professor Zachary and her team vanish.
 
Now a letter from a colleague of Zachary’s sends the Event Group, led by Major Jack Collins, chasing down the professor’s lost expedition and into the legendary darkness of the Amazon. Dedicated to discovering the truth behind the myths and legends propagated throughout world history, the Event Group---an agency within the U.S. government that officially doesn’t exist---ensures that mistakes from the past are never repeated. They are a dedicated collection of the nation’s most brilliant men and women of science, philosophy and the military.
 
Using cutting-edge technology exclusively designed for the Event Group by the U.S. military, they travel from Brazil to the Little Bighorn, from Columbia to the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery. As they do, the Event Group faces mounting opposition from several different adversaries bent on either discovering the whereabouts of El Dorado . . . or trying to bury the legend forever. Praise for Event
 
“Golemon puts his military experience to good use in this promising debut sure to satisfy fans of The X-Files . . . the plotting and hair’s-breadth escapes evoke some of the early work of Preston and Child, and the author's premise offers a rich lode of materials for inevitable sequels.”
---Publishers Weekly
 
"Imagine mixing in a blender a Tom Clancy novel with the movie Predator and the television series The X-Files. . . .  Readers who enjoy nonstop action and lots of flying bullets will enjoy Golemon’s first book in a projected series.”
---Library Journal
 
“The Roswell Incident--- whether legend, fact, or some combination of both---has inspired countless novels and movies over the years, but David Lynn Golemon’s Event peels back the layers of Roswell with refreshing originality. The action is spectacularly cinematic, the characters compelling, and the story is a flat-out adrenaline rush that pits real-world, cutting-edge military technology against a literally out-of-this-world threat. Even better, the Event Group itself is one of the best fictional agencies to arise in the literature of government conspiracies.”
---New York Times bestselling authors Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
“Fans of UFO fiction will find this a great read, and fans of military fiction won’t be disappointed either.”
---SFSIGNAL.COM

Reader Reviews
I recently saw a copy of David Lynn Golemon's first book, and thought it looked good enough to buy...unfortunately I didn't have the $ when I first spotted it. I came back a couple days later and discovered the only copy left at the local bookstore gone. Oh well...but out of nowhere I spotted Legend, which is a direct sequel. While after finishing this I wouldn't say reading the original is necessary, I would say doing so probably will help this experience a lot. The story takes us from the island of Iwo Jima and digging in a previously unknown tunnel to discover something horribly dangerous and hidden for more than half-a-century after being accidentally discovered during the original Japanese occupation and deliberately re-buried...to the jungles of South America, over to the Vatican in Italy and MANY locations in between...including different times in history. At first I was a bit puzzled at how the author was going to merge these plotlines together, but never fear, he does and he does it--in MY opinion rather creatively. For those of you who enjoy your action tales to have a healthy dose of the X-Files, some supernatural undertones mixed evenly with a great deal of violence, Legend is a book you probably ought to add to your collection. It requires you to drop your suspension of belief rather quickly -- but then again, what novel that proposes to have an X-Files-like theme doesn't? As for whether or not I enjoyed this book...I am actively searching to buy Event, his first novel if that means anything. If you enjoyed Steve Alten's Domain (a REAL page turner, BTW) this is right up your alley. As long as you aren't looking for absolute realism in your escapist fiction, you can certainly do worse than Legend. Comment | | (Report this)