Edenic

San Diego veterinarian James Paul Czajkowski sold his first manuscript when fantasy mainstay Terry Brooks was one of the judges in a writing contest he won. But an obvious problem loomed, so he wrote under the pen name James Clemens. As Clemens, Czajkowski wrote a fantasy series called The Banned and the Banished.

He adopted another pen name for some standalone techno-thrillers and the SIGMA Force series, and it's under that name of James Rollins that we meet him here with 2010's Altar of Eden. He also wrote the novelization of the poorly-received Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which he would probably rather you keep to yourself.

In Altar, we meet veterinarian Lorna Polk as she hurries to her special southern Louisiana research facility after its power has gone off in a storm. Just as power is restored and her team sees there is no damage, Dr. Polk is whisked away by a division of the Border Patrol that's investigating a beached boat on the Louisiana coast. They find no survivors except for some strangely changed -- and in some cases deformed -- animals. She helps the team, which is led by Jack Menard, brother of a high school boyfriend whose death she witnessed many years ago and is blamed for by his family except for Jack, determine that one of the deadliest of the altered animals escaped the boat and is headed for the Louisiana swamps. And yes, the relationship between Polk and Menard does to this novel exactly what that dependent clause did to the previous sentence -- makes you scratch your head and wonder why such a complication exists.

The pair discover the animals are part of some kind of experiment that has affected their brains as well as their bodies, and that the secret corporation behind it is very interested in keeping a low profile. So interested, in fact, that its employees are more than ready to murder to insure it.

Rollins writes a peppy, taut action scene and his veterinary background gives him a good working knowledge of much of the medical science at the root of his thriller. In its three main action set pieces -- the hunt for and confrontation with the escaped animal, fighting off corporate thugs at Polk's lab and storming an island research base -- Altar hums along uncluttered.

The exposition that comes in between the first two set pieces and the concluding one does almost the exact opposite. Clunky, wordy and littered with useless features, it sticks out in the book like a Windows Vista operating system among Mac Snow Leopards. It doesn't help that it also serves to introduce the shadowy CEO megalomaniac at the root of the experiments, who is so much of a stock character he's got to exist on some thriller author keyboard macro somewhere. He is, of course, greedy, ruthless and eeeeevil, but has the "unexpected character trait" of being a religious hypocrite. The mad scientist responsible for the experiments is just about as cookie-cutter, but he does allow Rollins to identify John 1:1 as a quote from Genesis so he -- or perhaps his creator -- is not without comic relief.

If you allow your inner Evelyn Woods to take over during the exposition passage and skim through it to the action and overlook Rollins' attempt to build Dramatic Tension by giving his two leads a Shadowy Shared Past, Altar of Eden is a diverting read and not likely to be the worst book you could buy from the Wal-Mart discount bin.