Fun sci-fi thriller up until it goes off the rails.

For about the first 75% of this book, I was totally on board. It was thrillery. It was sciencey. It was sciencey-thrillery. There was banter, and mystery, and some stealthy nerd references. There was a hero with an eidetic memory, and some scientists acting super secretive. There was an escalating problem and some freaky-deaky shenanigans involving folding space. And then it all got kind of weird and sort of imploded on itself.

The basic plot of The Fold is your standard sci-fi thriller. Hero is dragged in to top-secret project that absolutely positively nothing can go wrong with, stuff starts to go wrong, horribly wrong, hero and friends have to find a way to save the day. It follows that formula (with deviations) along the way, and it’s pretty satisfying, all things considered.

Our hero is Leland “Mike” Erikson, a high school English teacher with an eidetic memory and an IQ so high it maxed out the IQ test. His best friend Reggie works for DARPA and has been trying for years to get Mike to use his extremely high potential. He finally manages it with the top secret project called The Albuquerque Door. It will be Mike’s job to spend a couple of months evaluating the project and then report back to Reggie, to make sure that it’s safe, and that it deserves to be funded for another year. And then, you know, shit happens.

This was a super quick read. I think I read it in about three and a half hours. It just barrels along. And even when it got to the weird bits at the end, it was still really quick. The weird bits are what’s making me subtract a star. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I called the “twist” way before it actually happened, and then something else starts happening that’s so out of left field it goes beyond “you’ll never see this coming,” in to “this shouldn’t be in the book because it’s just too weird.” And I usually really like weird! This stuff just didn’t fit in with what had come before. It was too . . . jarring, or something.

A fun read, went off the rails towards the end, but ended okay all the same. Not sure if I’ll be reading any more Peter Clines books in the future. Will probably just play it by ear, and no harm done.