The Five Greatest Warriors by Matthew Reilly (1 star)

The Five Greatest Warriors is the even-more-silly sequel to The Six Sacred Stones that ended on a cliffhanger with Jack West Jr falling into an abyss. Despite the clumsy over-the-top cliffhanger, I certainly wasn't rushing out to buy this book, but thought I'd read it to finish off the story. So let the criticism begin (some spoilers ahead).

When Jack and Zoe are watching Pooh Bear's pulse as he breaks into the Israeli prison, isn't it convenient that they are waiting for it to take a sudden dive and the attackers oblige by drugging Pooh Bear? What if they had just decided to beat the shit out of him instead? Lame.

Reilly uses the 'traitor' plot twist far too often, by the end of the book most of Jack's team have turned out to be working for somebody else.

Counting JC as one of the 'Five Greatest Warriors' was ridiculous, and only done so that Reilly could make finding Jesus' tomb one of the tasks to be performed in the quest. Here is the shitty justification:

'Jesus Christ is not commonly called a warrior. He was a man of peace.'
'He carried a sword', Wizard countered, 'and at one famous point in the Gospel of Luke, he urged his followers to go and buy swords.'
'And many of those followers were revolutionaries urging insurrection against Rome,' Julius said.

Weak.

The descriptions of how the rest of the world is getting through the chaos of the dark star appearing are so tokenistic - a couple of paragraphs strewn here and there in-between action:

At the same time, the National Weather Service reported unusual weather patterns all over the world: fierce flooding in Brazil; sandstorms in China; cyclones in the Pacific; even a weeklong rainstorm in the Sahara Desert.

Meteorologists were confounded.
It was as if the world had gone mad.

Wow, what a shitty description of what is supposed to be the end of the frickin world.

At the third vertex there is a lava trap. Come on!

As soon as Jack set foot on the first step of the second tower, lava began oozing out the top of the third one, so that now three separate rivers of lava were pouring down from the peaks of the first three towers, all at different stages in their descents.

So what if someone had triggered this trap sometime in the previous few thousand years? The lava would have cooled, formed rock, and the intricate channel system would be blocked and never work again. What if the lava was a different temperature than the designers expected and didn't flow at all? Of course this is all assuming that building a giant intricate tower city inside a fricking volcano is a good idea. Nevermind the practicalities of how you actually build something that big inside a volcano in the first place, what are the chances the volcano won't erupt or damage the system in any way over the next few thousand years?

Continuing the completely implausible vertex locations, Reilly picks Diego Garcia, a coral atoll with maximum elevation of 6.7m as the perfect spot for yet another giant underground space. We're told that the entrance:

...resembled an open-cut mine, at least seven storeys deep...

I'd like to see someone try to dig a hole like that into a coral atoll; it would be a good way to make a big seawater swimming pool.

Of course the biggest problem is why the designers of the machine made it so ridiculously hard to turn on. And more to the point - if they knew exactly when disaster was going to occur, why not make it turn on automatically? If you went to all the trouble of making a machine to save the world would you really hide the keys to it all over the planet and booby trap their locations such that it is pretty much impossible for anyone to gather them? Sigh.

Given that Reilly wants to go even bigger with his next novel:

I'll have to make sure that it's a huge story idea. To my mind, any new Jack West Jr novel will have to be bigger and bolder than the three I've already written. And if I do decide to write it, I will do so with a plan to creating a story that will count down all the way to a seventh and final novel (The One Something Something).

I think my Reilly journey has ended.

1 star.