This appears to be the last book in a three book set. It is a very exciting book in that it continues with Dr. Alabama Wren and Jackson Stone. Both have belonged to a mysterious agency called Polaris. They are highly capable operatives or spies in simple terms. Stone has subsequently been promoted to the Scorpion special operations branch, He is on his first mission as head of a deadly team of 11 men and women. They are escorting a scientist, Dr. Daljeet Singh across a London bridge to an airport. Because of what Dr. Singh had been researching, there were a number of countries and other agencies that wanted him dead. Therefore this escort wasn’t going to be easy although they weren’t under any known threat.
That changed very quickly. Stone’s Scorpion convoy of several hight power cars came under immediate fire as they sped thru London. They were first attacked by a group of motorcyclist with machine guns and rocket launchers. The care Jackson and Dr. Singh were in didn’t last long so he dragged Dr. Singh to an abandon motorcycle and the sped off again towards the bridge. While doing this, Jackson realized that his team was getting decimated and that this wasn’t a random attack. He and his team had been setup.
Jackson made it to the bridge and across, but the motorcycle he was on crashed throwing both him and Dr. Singh down on the street. Stone got up to see where they were when he was shot. He moved to avoid further damage only to see a guy with a gun approaching Dr. Singh. Jackson finally realized he was falling having slid under the bridge railing when he was shot and now everything was going black.
So, that’s the opening of the book! Pretty exciting stuff right there. Oh, I’ve left a lot out so you’ll definitely want to read the first few chapters. We later will find out that Jackson Stone has survived his ordeal and is back at Scorpion HQ talking with Director Tanya Robinson. Stone figured his days an a Scorpion operator are done after his failed escort mission. He doesn’t believe it was all his fault since the original route for the convoy had been changed a day before the mission by someone unknown. Still, Stone took full responsibility for the mission failure. He wanted to find out who had killed all 11 members of his team and captured Dr. Singh. But, he couldn’t do it if he was put at a desk job within Scorpion or worse sent back to Polaris HQ as an analyst.
For some reason, though, Dr. Robinson began to tell Stone what Dr. Singh was involved in. In fact, she took him to a secret lab that was going through some of the experiments that Dr. Singh had been conducting. It appeared that Dr. Singh was some how developing plants that would not die. They manage to regenerate living cells while dying off old cells. This resulted in some rapid growth and other strange characteristics. Most of this is a lot of scientific jargon that you’ll have to wade through. One thing you will find out that Dr. Singh was a member of the Eden Society, another highly secret organization that’s mission and purpose wasn’t clearly known. Still, this was a lead that Stone was going to follow in his quest to find those responsible for killing his team.
But first, he had to get out of Scorpion HQ and probably do what he needed to do on his own. Only if he could team up with Dr. Alabama Wren would he feel comfortable tracking down this Eden Society. Meanwhile, unknown to him the same Dr. Wren was also trying to find the Eden Society. She had her own reasons and one that could mean her not dying as was her current state. She had contacted some alien virus from the spheres that she dealt with on a past mission and that virus was killing her. She thought she had a chance to find an antidote, a lotus flower. She had heard the Eden Society had the only know specific lotus flower in existence some where within their organization. She needed to find it and soon.
That’s what this book is about. You start with a story about something that happened way in the past. There was some kind of tablet that had a formula for something that either extended life or gave you immortality, I’m not really clear on this, but that tablet had been broken into three pieces with each piece carried off in different directions a long, long time ago. The Eden Society was determined to collect all three pieces and decipher the receipt it contained. Eventually, Dr. Alabama Wren and Jackson Stone are united in a search for the three pieces of the Ugarit Stone. Even the Pope gets involved in this story!
Good reading. I wouldn’t mind reading more of Jackson Stone and Alabama Wren in the future, but that’s up to Mr. Ellis & Wolfe. There’s nothing on Amazon that talks about another book, but you never know.