Mundus vult decipi.The world wants to be deceived.There it is, the main theme of the book - now, move on and go read The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness. I probably could stop my review right there, but because of my dedication to you, my goodreads friends, I won't. So, here it is, my (mostly) complete review of Caleb Carr's Killing Time.Now, let's be clear about one thing: "Mundus vult decipi - the world wants to be decieved." If there's one thing the author wants you to take away from this ...

I'm afraid I didn't care for this one. That is a bit upsetting to me, truth be told because Carr wrote one of my top ten favorite books of all time, The Alienist.So I listened to this one as an audiobook. It was one of those books I wasn't sure I wasn't sure I read. I learned quite quickly that I had read it before. So the audiobook was a re-read. The first half was amazing -- a 5+ star read. I listened to it and I was thinking, wow this is prophetic... It takes place in 2023 and Carr NAILED a l...

An entirely fascinating tale, published in 2000, that was almost prescient, in some ways, regarding what was then the near future. So much so, that at one point I had to look up the publishing date to determine that it hadn't been written after the Great Recession of 2007! In an age where information flows almost freely, knowledge has fallen prey to belief. Nothing can be trusted to be true, because the flow of information can be, and is indeed being, manipulated. This book explores that concept...

Description: Information flows freely in 2023, but is all--or "any"--of it accurate? Criminal profiler Dr. Gideon Wolfe investigates the murder of a friend in New York City when he is suddenly caught up in the company of a beautiful woman, her ingenious brother, and a band of techno-terrorists at war with the world itself.Do you remember that bit in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency when it turns out two brothers have been working under the one doctor's certificate? I wonder if there are two Ca...

Amazingly awful. Got 30 pages. It reads like a parody of a cyberpunk novel except not funny. Or maybe the author read a William Gibson novel and didn't get the part about making it even believable by the stretched standards of the genre. The first ten pages feature 40 product name drops, a flying saucer, black helicopters, two assasinations, and a prison break. Really, I think I'll go lie down now.

Oh god this is the worst book ever. The audio version read by the author is even more of a trainwreck. The characters are one-dimensional, the plot is full of holes, and the pacing is preposterous.

This book does excel at one thing: being unintentionally funny through Carr's mindless use of cliches. However, this is only amusing for the first third, after which you just want to throw the discs out the car window and continue on your road trip in silence.

Seriously, don't read this book.

I hate time travel SF and I hate mainstream authors who decide to "dabble" in SF, so it's a wonder I finished this one.

'real' authors who stoop to SF almost invariably wind up trying to pass off most hackneyed, overdone tropes as market fresh (Margaret Atwood being a prime offender), and this book is alas no exception.

Readable enough, and would certainly get higher marks from readers less familiar with SF than your truly.

No matter how much you liked The Alienist, avoid this book like the plague. This sucked more than Michael Crighton on a bad day. Seriously, one of the lamest, supposed thrillers I've ever read. If it had been 50 pages longer I probably wouldn't have finished it, but I suppose I was hoping it would improve somehow before the end. It never did.

As you can see, I really didn't like this book. The characters were one-dimensional and evoked no identification/sympathy whatsoever in me, the conspiracy was utterly incomprehensible, and oh my God, the exposition. There were huge chunks of exposition that, frankly, just bored the hell out of me while simultaneously not explaining a thing. I only kept reading it because I was at work, and didn't have another book with me. Actually, that's probably my strongest impression of what I did read - it...

I was so excited to read this as Caleb Carr's other novels are among my favorites. Sadly, I was pretty disappointed in this futuristic global scare tactic. The plot started out very interesting - a vision of how the topics of today (globalization, threats to the environment, terrorism, information technology, arm's control, etc) can result in a world of chaos and corruption in the future. It was basically a conspiracy theory that became increasingly implausible. Character development was pretty ...