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Impact
Impact
Impact
Audiobook11 hours

Impact

Written by Douglas Preston

Narrated by Scott Sowers

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

In Douglas Preston's Impact, Wyman Ford is tapped for a secret expedition to Cambodia... to locate the source of strangely beautiful gemstones that do not appear to be of this world.

A brilliant meteor lights up the Maine coast... and two young women borrow a boat and set out for a distant island to find the impact crater.

A scientist at the National Propulsion Facility discovers an inexplicable source of gamma rays in the outer Solar System. He is found decapitated, the data missing.

High resolution NASA images reveal an unnatural feature hidden in the depths of a crater on Mars... and it appears to have been activated.

Sixty hours and counting.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 5, 2010
ISBN9781427206824
Impact
Author

Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston has published 39 books of fiction and nonfiction, of which 32 have been New York Times bestsellers, some reaching the #1 position. Two of his novels, co-written with Lincoln Child, were chosen in a National Public Radio poll of readers as being among the 100 greatest thrillers ever written. His recent nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and National Geographic magazine. In addition to books, Preston writes about archaeology and paleontology for the New Yorker Magazine. He worked as an editor for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He is the recipient of numerous writing awards in the U.S. and Europe, and he served as president of the Authors Guild from 2019 to 2023.

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Reviews for Impact

Rating: 3.6117477378223497 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

349 ratings33 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I started this book many years ago and completely lost interest after about one third of the story. I decided to give it another chance.

    It isn't bad but it isn't spectacular either. The general idea is quite interesting and innovative even, though I can't say that it is very believable. But this is probably the case of all the stories connected with the threat from the space or outer civilisations. Still, I enjoyed the plot and the characters.

    I have read one other story with Wyman Ford and I will probably do it in the future since I liked him. I also really liked Abby who is an unobvious heroine.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book itself seems like it should be longer. Without spoiling it, there are parts without enough skepticism and you swear that Preston can't wrap this up in time. It feels like there is a part 2 book coming.However, the ending works and works very well. With different ending this wouldn't be a 4 star book. It worth a read just to see how the loose end tie up a the end.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Coming off of Blasphemy, Preston's newest solo novel is a bit of a disappointment. It's the 3rd book featuring ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford (and the 4th in a series if you count the link between The Codex and Tyrannosaur Canyon), which suggests that there should be some continuity from book to book, right?Well, Blasphemy ended with a startling bang, and I'd expect the next book in this series to mention it. But Preston didn't even give it a nod, which seemed like a wasted opportunity. After all, what's the point in using Wyman Ford again unless you want to bring his history with him? If you're not going to, why not just cook up another character? It wouldn't be difficult, especially since Wyman doesn't have much of a personality. He's just the sum of his actions; his character is solely comprised of what he does in each moment. And Preston should be better at creating memorable recurring characters than that - his books co-written with Lincoln Child are filled with them.Also, the semi-main character Abbey is a total jerk. I think we're supposed to root for her, but she constantly bullies her best friend, steals from her dad, smokes dope and does shots in physically dangerous moments when she really needs her wits about her, and worries about losing her iPod when a hitman is chasing her. Another character, Mark Corso, is equally difficult to root for, and I can't tell if we're supposed to think he's being treated unfairly or not. I think we are, but he acts so bloody pompous and entitled that I'm just not sure.The plot is typical Preston/Child - interesting and fast-paced and at times startling, but I would have enjoyed it much more if it hadn't been for the above problems. Probably because I know Preston is capable of more.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    So fun and thrilling! Escalated so quickly and super nice characters.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very exciting and well read (I’m from Maine and rhe accents were fun). Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    After Abbey Straw, an amateur astronomer, sees a meteor streaking through the sky, she is determined to discover the place where it landed and sets out with her friend, Jackie Spann, to explore several islands in search of the meteorite. At the same time, Wyman Ford is off to Cambodia in search of the strange, newly-discovered honey gems. And Mark Corso is involved in some intrigue within the National Propulsion Facility, which may or may not have anything to do with the mysterious death of his mentor and some strange gamma rays.With its fast pace and the unforeseen way in which the disparate plotlines weave together, this page-turner will surprise readers with its unexpected ending.Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Impact is a very well plotted science fiction thriller. It's a true “page-turner” that gathers steam and manages to hold up right through to the end. The premise is that there has been some kind of anomalous cosmic event that has impacted earth and there might be an ongoing conspiracy of some kind to keep knowledge of the “event” from reaching the people of the world. The characters are well drawn if a little cliched and I think the author invests a little too much energy in long action scenes especially at the end. I would have liked to have read more background about the science behind the central premise of the book. These are small complaints and I would recommend the book to anyone who likes thrillers or science fiction or even global-conspiracy themes. I would also recommend one of the authors' non-fiction books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I quite enjoyed this book. It was fast-paced and interesting, and the audiobook well-read. If it required a little extra suspension of disbelief near the end, I didn't mind, because it was all rolling along so well by that point I had to know what happened anyway. The plot had some twists I didn't see coming, so it kept me interested. A fun read!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Starts with a big fat doobie and a radioactive gem and gets worse from there.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What we have here are three concentric stories enveloped in a bigger story.

    A series of strange and exotic gemstones never before seen suddenly start to show up and garner the interest of the CIA. Why? The stones have never been seen before. Oh, and they're quite deadly from a radioactivity standpoint. Wyman Ford is contacted by his old CIA higher ups in order to head to cambodia and take pictures of the mine.

    At the same time the gems start showing up in Cambodia, a waitress/Princeton University dropout in Maine (Abbey) is using her telescope to gaze at the stars when she captures a picture of a meteoroid that struck the earth at just that time and landed off the coast of Maine. She's the only one who has any idea of the general area in which it fell. What's her idea? Find it and sell it on ebay!

    Moving across the coast to California and the National Propulsion Facility at Cal Tech. A Mars mapping mission was set in motion nearly a year ago. Its mission to take high resolution pictures of the surface of Mars as well as using ground penetrating radar to see below the surface. An employee of NPF and professor at Cal Tech finds some strange gamma ray emissions from the surface of mars during his usual work. He finds the anomaly dangerous and brings it to his superiors. This being impossible, his superiors call him crazy, discredit him and have him fired. Shortly after he's found in his home, mysteriously murdered by a homeless person, but not before he forwards his research to one Mark Corso, senior technician on the Mars mapping project. Mark's curiousity gets the better of him and he delves into the stolen data only to find a shocking discovery.

    Read Impact with a sense of fun. Enjoy it as the thrill ride, and the homage to the greats of science fiction that it is.


  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This 2010 thriller with a sci-fi premise keeps the reader guessing—and turning pages—start to finish. And, what’s with the moon? Our benign companion through space has suffered calamitously in several books I’ve read this year. Not good for us earthlings.In Impact, Princeton dropout Abbey Straw uses her new telescope to snap a photo of a brilliant meteor coming to ground somewhere in the island-dotted vastness of Muscongus Bay. “It ruined your picture,” says her friend Jackie, peering over her shoulder.“Are you kidding? It made the picture!”The astronomers all guess the meteor landed somewhere in the Atlantic, where it’s lost forever. Abbey, armed with her photo and data from a buoy showing no sea level perturbations at the time of the crash, believes it hit an island and she can find it. Selling a meteorite will do a great deal to replenish her empty bank account. If she gets there first.Meanwhile, the President’s science adviser has sent former CIA agent Wyman Ford to Southeast Asia. He’s to investigate the source of some strange new gems finding their way into circulation up from the seedier layers of the international gem market. Called honeys, they’re beautiful, but laced with deadly radioactivity—Americium 241, an isotope of an element not found in nature. The U.S. government, fearing the stones could be ground down to make a dirty bomb, wants a quick and quiet mission to investigate, not the heavy boots of the Agency. If Ford goes, he goes as a freelance. No cover, no backup.And, Mark Corso, working on a government-funded Mars observation project visits his former professor and mentor’s home and discovers his body—a murder the police describe as a random robbery-gone-wrong. The dead professor had been obsessed with tantalizing evidence that something on Mars is doing the impossible, emitting gamma rays, and sent Mark classified data and an illegal hard drive to prove it. Mark is determined to follow his lead, even though project managers forbid him to spend time on it.These three pieces of the story come together, of course. Hidden in the islands, in the jungles of Cambodia, and in a crater on Mars’s moon Deimos, is a literally earth-shattering threat. But before that can be understood, more than one opponent is determined to stop them. The plot moves along energetically and the characters of Abbey and Ford are engaging and believable. Corso is more than a bit irresponsible and self-satisfied, heedless of consequences. In fact, all the staff at the National Propulsion Facility (modeled on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) are two-dimensional. Preston expertly describes the settings Abbey and Ford must negotiate, whether the Cambodian jungles, the labyrinth of Washington, D.C., science agencies, or the stormy waters of the Atlantic.This book “dances on the edge of sci-fi but definitely is structured like a contemporary thriller,” says Amy Rogers on the review site ScienceThrillers. I enjoyed it, although at the very end, just when the reader understands the significance of the book’s title, he pulled his punches. He has a new one in the Wyman Ford series (The Kraken Project), and I’d certainly read it, too.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    IMPACT by Douglas PrestonIMPACT is a combination of political thriller, murder and science fiction peopled by a former CIA agent, a college dropout, a hitman, various political/business bosses and a fisherman. Each chapter (they are VERY short) is from a different character’s point of view. You need to keep track of the various folk you meet in the first chapters or you won’t be able to keep them straight when they pop up again. The science is pretty easy to follow. The battles between boat and sea, hitman and potential victims are tense and then more tense. The characters are likeable and complex. The plot is interesting and easy to follow although the parts are intricate and intertwined.Altogether this is an exciting, engrossing thriller that satisfies the reader.4 of 5 stars
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A meteor strikes the earth and two teenage girls take on the government on the chase to find it. It was an action thriller that, honestly, left a little to be desired. I was really disappointed because the beginning of the book deals with some radio-active gems apparently from the meteor (interesting!) and then that whole story line is ignored for the rest of the book. Hate that!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have come to rely on Douglas Preston for thrillers that pique my imagination, and he's done it again with Impact. Preston has teamed Ford with a beguiling amateur who's incredibly short on experience and extremely gifted with intuition and flying by the seat of her pants. It's just the right mix as the two work to find out what's happening on Earth and just how Mars is involved. The only small blight on an otherwise bright reading experience for me was the ending. Preston opted for an optimistic ending, but the cynic in me didn't feel that it would hold up to any sort of scrutiny. However, I do love reading his thrillers!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've read a lot of Preston's work, especially his collaborations with Child, and usually I like what they write. This solo venture is only "okay." It must have been hard for Preston to find a way to tell the story without giving the punchline up front, but as it is, in order to try to build a sense of suspense, he has to avoid saying some plot-essential elements until the second half of the book. Problem is, as a result, the first half of the book is difficult to follow, as there is nothing to tie the various threads he constructs together. Taking up fully one-half of the book to develop a series of story lines is just tedious and disappointing, as there is no obvious way to tie the threads together until you get well into the second half of the book. By then, you've lost any sense of connection with the characters, so there's no real feeling for the characters and what's going on.Not bad if you need a book to read, and there's some entertainment value. Don't expect much.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I got lost in the flipping back and forth between different people that I didn't care about. I stopped after about 30-40 pages.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A quick adventure. The ending was too sudden, a bit forced, predictable, and far fetched, but hey a little escape for 4 hours is always good.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Preston is able to take a sci-Fi based story and create a mystery, great characters and believable situations.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Impact starts out with three seemingly unrelated story lines, but they all come together in an exciting (yet improbable) plot. The end let me down a bit. It was fairly anti-climactic, but I enjoyed the ride.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm a huge fan of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, together or separate so when I saw this book on the shelves I immediately picked it up. I knew I had something in hand that would keep my attention and would be enjoyable to read. For the most part that was the case. However, I was disappointed at the end of it. I thought the last 100 pages or so were very rushed and actually thought I'd maybe missed something and went back and reread about 25 pages pages. The very ending was rather boring, simple, and predictable. I expected something better from Douglas Preston.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The story of how a young woman saved the Earth.Well written but good only for a Disney teenager movie.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed this recent book from Douglas Preston and read it within a day. Although not the best book I've read from him, it nonetheless kept my interest and kept me turning pages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a combination spy/science-fiction thriller. It's not the most intricately developed plot, but it's an enjoyable read. The resolution reminded me very much of something Isaac Asimov might have written, so I certainly regarded it as satisfactory.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    They had to say 4 or 5 times "A civilization/technology that advanced would certainly understand English" in an attempt to convince us of such hooey. Abbey and Jackie great characters, fabulous boat-in-a-storm scenes
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed the first three-quarters of this book, but then it just got a little silly. I'm not much into science fiction and this veered too far that way. The cloak and dagger stuff that took up the first half was pretty intriguing, but most of the characters were pretty flat. It seemed like Preston wanted to tell several stories, but unfortunately fell upon the least interesting of the three.While I really enjoyed the movie “Independence Day,” the last quarter of “Impact” reminded me of some of the silliness of that movie—successfully flying a spaceship to the Mother ship; uploading a virus (using a Mac, of course) to the Mother ship; successfully flying back to Earth…I think "Blasphemy" was a far better book by Preston.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was due for an enjoyable novel. Great suspense and nicely written, this was hard to put down. The audio book's narration was excellent and there was enough good science in it that Wikipedia did not contradict it or make the overall storyline impossible. I enjoy the bigger picture of life and the universe that the author makes us consider via the plot, even if some of the travails and victories of the characters are against the odds and written as movie-rights bait.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After reading over the previous reviews, I must agree on most of their points. (As you can see from my list, I'm a fan of Preston and Child, singly or together). My overall impression of this book was that I thought the alien connection was handled better than Carl Sagan did it in Contact. Admittedly, I read that some time ago, but the impression remained that it was a heavy-handed treatment of the subject. This book is a romp through the subject, a good read, and a satisfying conclusion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am in general a fan of the Preston/Lincoln books and was interested to see how this solo book would be. I loved the premise and the story itself was a fun read. Some parts were hard to believe like Abbey having attended just 1 or 2 years of college level astronomy classes and being able to do a lot of what she did. Still if you ignore those types of things and just go with the flow this makes an enjoyable read. Abbey is a mouthy young girl who while not the most likeable person you have to start feeling bad for her after she gets herself into one bad situation after another. Ford immediately wins a spot in my heart from his actions early on in the book. I have mixed feelings when we finally find out who the mole at the National Propulsion Facility is because it comes as a surprise but almost too much so that it seems a little off base.The main reason I did not give this book a higher rating is the end was very anti-climatic for me. You have all this great build up and then at the end I was thinking to myself, “Really? That’s how it’s going to end? Kind of lame.” Still it’s a book worth picking up if you are a fan of Preston’s other books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't have many requirements for any book in the thriller genre. However, I have some expectations: (1) I want to be entertained; (2) The science should be realistic enough that, even if improbable, I can still suspend my belief to enjoy the story; (3) Interesting characters always a plus. It should be easy for an author to achieve? In reality, I rarely get all three of my wishes.Impact certainly has fulfilled two and a half of my expectations. Fast paced, it doesn't let up until the last page. I was afraid that Preston wouldn't be able to tie all the knots in the end to my satisfaction, but he was able to do just that. While the plot is very improbable (strange matter traversing through the planet and alien weapons) there were other elements (government agents conspiring to keep secrets, foreign shadow agents trying to undermine US, a hit man) that brought it back to the more 'believable' realm and made the plot very entertaining. The science descriptions were easy to follow and did not feel like out of a college text book. I am not an astronomer, so I can't say how accurate the scientific information described, but I was able to follow it and didn't let it interfere with my enjoyment of the story. The character development (as expected for this genre) is small. However, Mr. Preston at least made the protagonists likely enough that I cared to know their fate.If you are looking for an entertain read, I would recommend Impact.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Loved the bood. Full of suspense and fast paced. Several story lines blend together to a brilliant end. An impact hits Cambodia and Maine with different results. In Maine, a young girl drawn to astronomy seeks to find the meteor that hits near her home town. Her brave friend joins her adventure; At the same time, Wyman Ford heads at his government's request to seek out the source of radiation in Cambodia. What he finds shocks him.In Pasadena at the Jet Propulsion Lab, a scientist is dead and his finding are passed on to a protoge' who finds the truth of the impact from NASA photos on the secreted data. He passionately tries to convince his superiors that the data is ominous.All three events converge into a great end. Read it.