• Books and reading

    New short fiction: ‘Unrestricted Access’ by James Rollins

    The first thing I should say is that I am not a big fan of the thriller genre. Crime fiction and true crime? Yes, if it is well written and character driven. But I get bored by fight scenes, car chases and bomb blasts.

    I do, however, enjoy short fiction, so I was not altogether the wrong person to review James Rollins’ collection of new and classic short fiction, Unrestricted Access. Rollins is a New York Times best selling author, so there are plenty of thriller loving fans around the globe who will enjoy these stories in his first ever anthology, many of which introduce or give some back story for characters from his novels.

    The stories’ setting range from Afghanistan to the jungles of South America, San Francisco in the ‘Summer of Love’ to the Paris Catacombs. And the characters vary from operatives of an elite US Defence unit, Sigma Force, to an ambitious journalist and a military war dog.

    The plots are tight, with a fast pace, plenty of action and often a neat twist at the end. Each story has a short introduction by Rollins and readers of his longer works will be interested in the connections with characters or settings from his novels.

    If you are a fan of the genre, the twelve stories in Unrestricted Access will have you turning the pages to find out ‘what happens next’.

    Unrestricted Access is published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in October 2020.

    My thanks to the publishers for a copy to read and review.