Ken McClure - Scorpion’s Advance

review by Ro Bennett on show 10th Nov 2011

Recently Corinna reviewed Donor by Ken McClure and so I bought it for my Kindle for 94p which I thought was an amazing bargain. Whilst browsing I noticed that McClure had also written a book called Scorpion’s Advance which is based in Israel and this sounded very interesting. It was published by Collins/Fontana in the UK in 1986 and a new book wan’t available, it was only possible to buy a used paperback from £7.15 including post and package but was only £3.58 on Kindle and, so I bought the bargain Kindle version.

Like Donor, Scorpion’s Advance is a medical mystery. McClure's work is informed by his background as an award-winning research scientist with the UK's Medical Research Council, so I did learn some interesting medical facts from the book and found that aspect very appealing and absorbing.

Bacteriologist, Dr Neil Anderson is asked by the hospital authorities to try and discover what disease could possibly have transformed a healthy medical student into a grotesque corpse within hours. His investigation uncovers an unlikely link between Klein's routine participation in testing a new drug and the research laboratories of Dr Jacob Strauss, one of the foremost medical scientists of his day.

Was Klein's death purely a medical mishap? Or was it, as Anderson begins to suspect, the result of something much more secret - and infinitely more sinister?

Initially I found the book very interesting, a real page turner and full of suspense. I loved the descriptions of Israel and was enjoying it very much. However, by about two thirds through I was weary of all the violence and gruesome deaths and started skimming over the gory bits.

The plot also lost credibility for me. Neil Anderson is intercepted by the CIA and informed that they are involved in the investigation and are protecting him from getting murdered. Knowing this, and how brutal and ruthless all the murders have been, having barely escaped being killed himself on at least three occasions he’s aware of, he and his girlfriend slip away from the bodyguards and drive into the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night to break into a place where they think experiments are being conducted illegally. To me that was absolutely ridiculous - true it added to the tension and sense of danger and had gruesome consequences, but it would have been far more feasible to tell the CIA, hand the facts over to them and let them risk their lives - they’re professionals, they have back up and they’re paid for it!

Another thing which I found really irritating was the poor editing. There were countless typos - so many that I began highlighting them. Many of the two syllable words were hyphenated - hear -ing, Ander-son, acci- dental, and instead of I’d it read Td several times. Occasionally sentences were split up - e.g. ‘So you thought you’d find secret stocks of cultures in my ...(new line)...desk. On the other hand the speech was jumbled up, there were whole paragraphs of dialogue without a new line for each person speaking which made the conversation totally confusing.

Kindle have an experimental Text to Speech function. The Kindle reads the book to you. Unfortunately it’s dreadful. It’s a digital voice and it completely disregards the punctuation so that sentences run into each other, there are pauses in the wrong places and consequently the text doesn’t make sense. So rather disappointing all round sadly.