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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780380789184
ISBN number: 0380789183
Label: HarperTorch
Manufacturer: HarperTorch
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 464
Printing Date: October 01, 2001
Publishing house: HarperTorch
Release Date: October 02, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 35720
Studio: HarperTorch
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A series of high-speed fatal car wrecks -- accidents that seem. as if they may have been staged -- is leading Darwin Minor down a dangerous road. A reluctantexpert on violent ways to die, he sifts clues from wreckage the way a brilliant coroner extracts damning information from a victim's corpse. But the deeper hedigs, the more enemies he seems to make, and the wider the conspiracy seems to grow. Before long, he'll find himself relying on deadly resources of his own inorder to save his life -- and those of untold others.
Amazon.com Review:
Genre-jumping novelist Dan Simmons makes a splash no matter where he leaps. His 1985 horror debut, The Song of Kali, garnered the World Fantasy Award; the vampiric Carrion Comfort took the Bram Stoker Award; Hyperion, the opening volume of his Hyperion saga, snagged the Hugo. In 1999's The Crook Factory, Simmons spun fact, fiction, and Ernest Hemingway into a ripe WWII spy thriller, and with Darwin's Blade, Simmons dives headlong into the suspense pool.
The country's foremost accident investigator, Dr. Darwin Minor, reconstructs automobile accidents for his friends, Lawrence and Trudy Stewart, whose firm specializes in uncovering lucrative, yet unremarkable, insurance fraud. Odd, then, that two Russian hit men in a souped-up Mercedes E 340 endeavor to murder Dar in a 160 mph car chase that results in an airborne Mercedes and two dead Russians.
Sydney Olson, the California state's attorney's chief investigator, who's investigating an accomplice-murdering fraud ring, plans to release a story highlighting the Russian mafia's involvement and Dar's name, and then to spend a lot of bodyguard-time with Dar.
Dar returned her challenging gaze. Suddenly she did not look like Stockard Channing to him anymore. 'You're staking me out like that goat in the dinosaur movie... Jurassic Park.'
'Exactly,' said Sydney Olson, smiling openly at Dar now.
Lawrence raised his hand like a schoolboy.
'I just don't want to find my friend Dar's bloody leg on my moon roof someday, okay?'
As the bond between Dar and Sydney grows, so grow the assassination attempts, a gruesome body count, and the realization that a state-wide charitable organization funded by the country's most famous defense attorney is behind the murderous ring.
With its tight plot, memorable and likable cast, and brisk, intelligent narrative, Darwin's Blade has 'series' written all over it. Better make room on the Edgar dais now. --Michael Hudson
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Rated by buyers 
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Dan Simmons continues to amaze me. I really like the way he ties the works of other authors (Keats, Chaucer, etc.) into his novels, providing interesting new viewpoints and new contexts for those works. He is no copy-cat, though--his works are fresh and exciting and, in my honest opinion, often more interesting than those works by the authors he mimics.
He uses dialog superbly, which gives the characters real weight throughout his novels. His use of imagery is sublime, but not over-the-top. I truly enjoy reading his books. In fact, I'm going though his various paperbacks right now!
His ability to cross genres is impeccable and a testament to his literary prowess.
Rated by buyers -
I had never read Dan Simmmons before and I was drawn into this novel very quickly. The problem is this book is a lot like the high speed chase that occurs in the story early on, a whole lot of energy and excitement comes to a halt just a bit too quickly.
Darwin Minor makes his living investigating accidents. Be it the space shuttle disaster or a drunk person driving off a cliff, Minor is the best at exposing whatever it was that caused the event. He is also quite hardened by both a stint in Vietnam and his own personal tragedy.
The book opens like gangbusters. Returning from investigating a couple of odd accidents, Minor finds himself being chased by a couple of guys with high-powered rifles. An exciting chase suddenly leads us to the Russian mob, a lawyer turned tv star, corrupt officials, a romantic interest, strange deaths, and even a brief side trip to Vietnam. It is a lot to take in and I was really enjoying it up to about page 200(of 360+ pages).
After that I thought the story slowed down a bit and took some twists and turns I had trouble accepting. Bodies start piling up and you need a program to keep track of the names. There is a helicopter-versus-glider chase which seems lifted from Clive Cussler's (excellent) "Valhalla Rising" airplane chase(not sure which was published first). Finally, there is a shoot-em-up climax that, for me, went a bit over the top. Overall, I felt a great start just never lived up to the promise.
On the plus side, I enjoyed the combination of humor, suspense, and even the theories the author throws in about real-life accidents this country has endured. I would give Mr. Simmons another chance. My belief is if you are a fan of say a Robert Crais or Michael Connelly you might like this author's style. So my overall recommendation is if you haven't read this man before, try something else before sticking your eyes into "Darwin's Blade."
Rated by buyers 
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Simmons moves around between genres. I like that. My only problems is that it seems like Marine snipers (e.g., Stephen Hunter) seem to be around a lot lately. Like the technical stuff. Humour is a nice touch.
Rated by buyers -
Either you enjoy the joke of this book, or you don't.
"Darwin's Blade" is a thriller very much in the Michael Crichton mode, very similar in style to "Rising Sun" or "Jurassic Park" (which Simmons mentions). The protagonist is an "accident reconstruction specialist," very similar to an M.E. such as Jonathon Kellerman's Alex Delaware, only Dr. Darwin Minor (Ph.D.) reconstructs accidents based on his knowledge of physics; he doesn't solve murders based on his medical degree. And being a thriller, of course the Bad Guys are after Our Hero for reasons that are only gradually revealed over the course of the novel. And it wouldn't be a thriller/mystery if there wasn't a love interest, some scotch, and a little discreet sex.
But anyone who takes this book too seriously is doing themselves a serious disservice. A book that begins with a famously-disproved, urban-legend "Darwin Award-winning" accident where the main character is named "Darwin?" A book where the chapters have puns like "G is for Whiz," or silly jokes like "E is for Ticket?" Where every chapter is alphabetical from A-Z, a la Sue Grafton? Where Harlan Ellison is mentioned by name? Where the main character is an obvious over-the-top Heinlein hero?
It's a romp, a pastiche, a blenderized combination of Kellerman, Chandler (the main character drinks scotch, lives in LA, and plays chess, for crying out loud!), Heinlein, Ellison, Crichton, Grafton, and Steven Hunter's "Point of Impact." This book is a gift to Simmons fans, and to fans of urban legends, mysteries, thrillers, and folks who find this kind of thing funny. I loved it, frankly. I thought it was by turns hilarious, suspenseful, and interesting. Other reviewers obviously hated it. I can completely understand that. It's derivative, juvenile, silly, and absurd. But of course, it seems to me that it's *supposed* to be all of those things, and if you go into it ready to enjoy it for what it is, you'll have a good time. If you're expecting the latest Elmore Leonard or the subsequent "Hyperion," you're going to be vastly disappointed.
Rated by buyers 
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Dan Simmons is an excellent writer, no doubt about it. But this poor effort is so riddled with weak cliché and flat, predictable characters that it's almost painful to get through. (At one point I finally began enjoying it simply for its silliness.
The plots is, well, fine. Nothing special, nothing unique. Bad guys have a plot, good guys are working to uncover it.
But oh, what good guys. Our Hero, Darwin "Dar" Minor, is as close to superman as one can be without having super powers. He's an ex-Marine sniper who's all but perfect with weapons. He's a Vietnam War hero. He's rich, somehow.
He owns a cabin in the woods with all the modern conveniences, including a trap door leading to a secret, bomb-proof storage room that also has its own air supply thanks to a shaft from a nearby gold mine. (No spoilers there; Dar explains that when he gives us a tour.)
He's an expert in literature, the arts, and even liquor. He's an expert pilot, an expert driver, an expert accident reconstructor, and has a Ph.D in physics. He drives the perfect car (which, we learn in the acknowledgements, is what Mr. Simmons drives).
Oh, and he also has a near-photographic memory. At one point, recalling a news story of a murder from several years back, he says, "I remember reading that it was a double tap to the head from a distance of six hundred meters. A newspaper report said that the bullets recovered were 7.62-by-fifty-four-millimeter-rimmed."
Getting beyond the silly protagonist, there's plenty more to be annoyed with. Dar's main job is as an insurance investigator, and the novel is peppered with investigations put there, seemingly, strictly to be funny, as they do little to advance the plot.
Problem: All these investigations are taken straight from a list of cliché urban legends, starting with "man attaches rockets to car and ends up embedded in cliff" (http://www.snopes.com/autos/dream/jato.asp) and including "drunk man shoots self when his phone rings in the middle of the night and he 'answers' his gun."
Simmons didn't even bother to get creative with his insurance-investigator banter. When a few of them are sitting around talking about funny past cases, the ones they claimed to have worked on were taken verbatim from an age-old e-mailed joke list (http://www.snopes.com/humor/lists/insurance.asp).
It's sad that Simmons couldn't even bother (or simply wasn't creative enough) to come up with his own stories and had to lift them from others. But "weak" is par for the course in Darwin's Blade.
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