Ahhh…. This is a good book for escapist decompressing, but…. a wee bit over the top with a seriously disabled FBI vet (as well as astro-physicist, professor and novel writer) going in for chasing down a bunch of run amok and sadistic bomb-makers.   I didn’t really expect what I got because I thought it was going to be a standard procedural or who-done-it. The blurbs about the Guggenheim intrigued me.  Ha! This is far more wreckage-creating and action oriented than most contemporary thrillers – the ones I’ve read anyway.  

*******
Under Pressure
By Robert Pobi 
2020 / (448 pages) 
Read by Will Damron – 11h 37m Lucas Page series #2
*******

Anyway – grab your map of New York City  (the small Google map with restaurants and hotels will do) because the bomber strikes here and there across the boroughs as well as one place a bit upstate.  This is to say nothing of the investigations being located in various places.  Oh and btw, it’s Halloween so there are kids out and a few extra costumes.  

But the writing is great for a thriller, the characters are good except for the lead good-guy, who stands out as being seriously disabled, brilliant, defiant and has a rather high proclivity for defiance and risk-taking. He stays completely sympathetic though.  

To jump kick the plot there’s a Guggenheim blast which kills 700 people.  And the investigation of that gets going quickly into a midnight-oil burning, page-turner.   
It’s all very contemporary and high tension, but definitely fiction.  New York City and its crazies are out not excluding either the lowlife or the highly placed. After the Guggenheim mess there’s the old Western Union building and internet hub and various and sundry blasts after them.  

Lucas Page is an astro-physicist, a bestselling author and a university professor. Also, he’s about 1/2 bionic (as we used to say), thanks to a tragic accident.  He also works, as consultant at least, for the FBI because what he does, well, one thing he does, is he sees events and go back a few seconds in time to automatically comprehend whatever math is involved and then project what just happened, like wondering where a bullet came from so he instantly calculates the trajectory. 

Another thing he does seems like reading minds, but it’s simply reading the expressions and body language and using awareness and logic on all the clues a savvy 21st century Sherlock Holmes might put together.  The book gets deeply into his doing until it seems like sci-fi/fantasy super-powers but I don’t think so – he’s just extraordinarily talented at picking up on causes where most of us see only effects.   He’s also married to a medical doctor and together they have adopted 5 children and live in a luxurious semi-estate as well as an apartment in Manhattan – this is mostly only good for an overarching plot line holding a series together.  

 If you enjoy thrillers this is a good one.  I’ll probably get the next one in the series but I’m not going back to catch the first one because the narrator for that one is horrible.  This reader, Will Damron, is great.