Fire With Fire (Gannon)

Fire With Fire
by Charles E. Gannon (2014)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This is a book that I should've read quite a while ago. I've met Chuck Gannon on a couple of occasions. The second time, he remembered me from the first time, and even congratulated me on being published, which was something that I'd been trying to do the first time. The group discussion we had might've contained some spoilers, but I'm sure I'll forget them by the time I get that far into the series.

Update: Okay, it's been almost a month and I haven't gotten back to this or to the books that came after it. Real life gets in the way. Luckily, this is a popular series, so synopsies can be found online. My main reason for having this blog is to remind myself about the books I read in the past when I don't recall the details. (Hell, there are books that I don't even remember reading contained in this blog.) This novel isn't likely to become one of those.

At the very basic level, Caine Riordan is a "polymath", a person who can sees a lot of things and assemble facts out of them. He sees things differently from other people, but not in any science fictiony way. He is found someplace he shouldn't be, and we are to assume that he could be a spy or saboteur or something, so the captain of that ship puts him in deep freeze, suspended animation for long voyages. He is this placed in a different deep freeze and kept there for over a decade. This causes memory issues, and he doesn't remember anything about the last day before he was arrested.

He's promised that he'll be told about it, but he's needed to do some work for the government. He's sent to a planet and finds evidence of extra-terrestrial life, which is inconvient to the megacorporation that's doing work there. Several attempts on his life later, and he's reporting in that the life he found there couldn't have built the structures that he found. They had to have been built by humans thousands of years ago. He further deduces that another alien species must've brought humans and the creatures that he met there thousands of years ago.

It's finally revealed to him that there are alien caretakers in space, and they have been in contact. And now Riordan is part of a diplomatic team that is going to some kind of galactic United Nations where they define borders and boundaries of space and such. Diplomatic problems ensue. This is the second part of the book, and almost feels like a second book, but it comes back to Earth, and old threads are picked up.

Throughout the book, there is a mysterious man who likes to eat olives who has a box with a button on it. He presses the button and someone (a specific target) dies. At first, I thought it was going to be some kind of nanobot thing associated with other people eating olives, but it's even more sciencey than that.

I have book two out of the library and just need time to sit and read it. This next one will be a trade paperback, which are slower reads for me these days.

I enjoyed it, and it really picked up once I got into it. I don't know why I had a few false starts with this book in the past.