Book Report: Area 51 by Bob Mayer

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

January 25, 2016

As indicated before, I started reading break away or debut novels by prominent authors last year. And here I am to deliver another book report!

Area 51 – Bob Mayer

Bob Mayer was one of the speakers at last year’s Clarksville Writer’s Conference. He was hilarious, gung ho, maybe a tad bombastic (retire Green Beret), and best selling author that had no hesitation to brag he makes about $1000/day with his trove of published novels.

Like or hate his personality, he has succeeded so I wanted to read one of his first works. It turns out, this novel was released under the pen name “Robert Doherty” through classic channels. He has since gotten the IP rights for all these past novels reverted back to him, a business move worthy of respect, and moved on to e-books.

Back to the story. It really is pretty neat. The writing is crisp, the dialog cool. I kept turning page after page, wanting to know what happens. I also had an inbuilt curiosity as to what this author would do. I have seen TV shows set in Area 51 like Seven Days, Stargate: SG-1 (based near Area 51 and steeped in similar military conspiracy), and other movies.

There was a bit of investigative journalism gone wrong combined with other historical legends. I must admit that part (won’t give it away!) really whet my appetite.

Bob Mayer indeed knows how to write. He knows how to make you turn the pages. I think I spent 3-4 days tops reading this book. I’ll confess it didn’t match my hunger in reading the debut Jack Reacher novel KILLING FLOOR. But then again, I’m finding it hard to spot the next novel that will compete on that level.

I’ll shoot with you straight on this: it wasn’t as hard to move to another novel by another author when I finished as it was for certain other novels. There were other series novels I read last year that made it hard to stop and move on instead of continuing the series. This one wasn’t the same. Will I ever go back and read more of Bob Mayer’s books?

Maybe/maybe no. I have read some of his other non-fiction books on writing craft, so in a sense, the man has already scored additional sales. It takes a top notch story with top notch characters and top notch writing to score that with me, and Jack Reacher has made me picky. Don’t take it a nock.

If you like SciFi and military conspiracies, you’ll find this book most entertaining.

Happy reading!

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