Horror
BSI-Starside: Final Inquiries
By Roger MacBride Allen
Bantam Spectra, 2008
Paperback, $6.99
421 pages
If you’re looking for something light, not too disturbing, that combines police procedurals with speculative science fiction, this may be worth picking up.
“Final Inquiries” seems to be the second in a series about a couple of “space-cops,” as it were, in an organization called the Bureau of Special Investigations, which has the duty of looking into crimes involving humans outside of the Earth system and those that involve interactions between humans and alien intelligent beings.
Allen is the spouse of a U.S. Foreign Service operative, and he uses that experience to build interesting details into this particular work, involving high-stakes interstellar diplomacy and death.
The human heroes of the story are Hannah Wolfson, the senior BSI agent, and Jamie Mendez. (Romance isn’t really a factor in this story.)
The movie “The Ruins,” based on Scott Smith’s 2006 best-selling novel, will be in theaters on April 4. That gives you a little time to read the book before you see the movie. After watching the trailer for the movie, I’m a bit afraid that Smith’s absolutely riveting and wickedly spooky book might turn into just another cheesy horror flick.
In the novel, two young American couples visiting Cancun make friends with a German whose brother has gone off to join an archaelogical dig in the area. Searching for him, the small group find themselves in the jungles of Yucatan at a deserted Mayan site where they encounter something sinister and terrifying. The story becomes one of survival as the characters react in different ways to the life-or-death situation.
In the book, there’s a slow and suspenseful unveiling of a menace that will be difficult to reproduce on film. The good news, though, is that Scott Smith wrote both the book and the screenplay, and this double duty worked well for his last film venture. His screenplay for “A Simple Plan” based on his 1993 novel was nominated for an Oscar in 1998.
Also, Carter Smith, the director of “The Ruins,” said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, that “the movie is significantly different from the book. There’s definitely lots of changes, so it’ll be a new experience for readers.”
My advice is to read the book now (it’s in paperback), and then wait for the Beifuss review before you see the movie.
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