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    Mercury Rises
    Mercury Rises
    Mercury Rises
    Audiobook9 hours

    Mercury Rises

    Written by Robert Kroese

    Narrated by Kevin Stillwell

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Mercury Rises: The explosive sequel to Mercury Falls!

    Jaded religion reporter Christine Temetri and Mercury, a renegade angel, have just thwarted two diabolical plots to destroy the world. But their work isn’t finished yet: mysterious powers outranking even the Heavenly bureaucracy seem intent on keeping the Apocalypse on track. While the world is plagued by natural disasters and nations prepare for war, crazed billionaire Horace Finch plots to use a secret device hidden beneath the African desert to discover the deepest secrets of the Universe—even if he has to destroy the Universe to do it. Meanwhile, unassuming FBI investigator Jacob Slater tries in vain to find a rational explanation for the mysterious destruction of downtown Anaheim—a quest that ultimately brings him to Kenya, where he meets Christine and Mercury. Together, the three must stop Finch from activating the device and tearing reality to pieces. Uproarious and wildly entertaining, Mercury Rises proves that the devil is in the details!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 18, 2012
    ISBN9781469200750
    Mercury Rises
    Author

    Robert Kroese

    Robert Kroese’s sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan—home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In second grade, he wrote his first novel, the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. In 2009, he called upon his extensive knowledge of useless information and love of explosions to write his first novel, Mercury Falls. Since then, he has written nine more novels and learned to play the guitar very poorly. Find out about Rob at http://sfauthor.net, connect with him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/robkroese, and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/robkroese. To get exclusive free fiction and updates about future releases from Robert Kroese, sign up for his mailing list at http://sfauthor.net/get-email-updates.

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    Reviews for Mercury Rises

    4/5

    62 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was an interesting sort of story. I knew when I accepted the book for review that it was the second in the series and was told that it could stand alone. I really felt that I was missing something by not reading book one in the series because I didn't really find out very much about Mercury or Christine and felt that there was a lot of backstory that would have made this a richer reading experience. The tone of the story is deeply ironic. I was told that it was funny but "funny" is so subjective. I didn't find it funny. To me it was more mildly amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. I especially enjoyed the footnotes which often went off on tangents and seldom illuminated the passage they were supposed to.The story essentially weaves the stories of Eddie Pratt - demon and would-be author, Jacob Slater - FBI explosions expert and a sufferer of something in the Asperger's spectrum, Mercury - low-level and seemingly amoral angel, and Christine - former reporter for a religious publication who tries to inject some of the human point of view to the situation. The basic plot seems to be thwarting whoever it is who is trying to destroy the Earth. The story jumps around in time from 2000 BC in Babylonia to the present day in Anaheim, California and somewhere in rural Kenya. The apparent villains are Tiamat - another low-level angel but with a strong desire to rule the world, Lucifer who apparently figured prominently in the first book, and crazed billionaire Horace Finch. I say apparently because it is not altogether clear to me who is was who was actually behind the plan to destroy the Earth or even if the plan really was to destroy the Earth. This story had layers on layers of conspiracy and each of the characters only sees a piece of the puzzle.The character I liked the most was Jacob Slater. I identified with his frustration at not being able to understand what caused the Anaheim Event and his phlegmatic acceptance of his kidnapping. His bit of the story did cause a few small chuckles.This is a story for those who like absurdity and some social commentary in their fiction. It is designed for those with a quirky sense of humor. I liked the style of the book and found the prose very readable.
    • 3/5
      Not quite as good as the previous, but still fun.
    • 2/5
      I said the first in the series (Mercury Falls) was a homeless man's "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. This would be a homeless man's Mercury Falls, which is to say, not very good. It's basically a lot of pseudoscience/pseudoreligious babble and tepid jokes.
    • 5/5
      Book Info: Genre: Urban Fantasy, humorousReading Level: AdultRecommended for: anyone who likes to laugh and doesn't take religion too terribly seriouslyTrigger Warnings: book burningAnimal Abuse: A character feeds a stray cat liverwurst laced with gunpowder in an attempt to blow it up. It is poisoned but survives; however, it is later killed by the city pound. A goat is sacrificed by an tribe in Kenya.My Thoughts: “Each time a Charlie Nyx book hit the shelves, the state of the world would deteriorate. Wars, earthquakes, flooding, epidemics, the Clash of the Titans remake... things were truly getting out of hand...” It's the end of the world as we know it, but it's okay, because you'll laugh your way into the Apocalypse. Mercury is back, and this time he's even more confused. Some of the best parts of this book are the characters. For instance... Despite his attempts to blow up a cat when he was a kid, I rather liked Jacob Slater. He was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome when he was a kid, which he describes as, “...a vaguely defined condition which, in the final analysis, meant that people gave him the heebie jeebies.... No one really knew what was wrong with Jacob Slater. The doctors who had analyzed him two decades earlier hadn't actually found anything definitively wrong with him. Yes, they had offered an authoritative-sounding diagnosis, but it wasn't as if they had discovered anything concrete like an imbalance of bodily humors or a band of angry dwarves living in his small intestine.”I also enjoyed the flashbacks with Tiamat. “Never a hands-on leader, Tiamat rarely even bothered these days to make the occasional unscheduled appearance to berate the laborers for their stupidity and laziness and throw a few over the edge [of the ziggurat] as an examples for the others.” Watching her build up Babylon was great, and her entitled attitude is a hoot. “You don't know what it's like, trying to build a great civilization while abiding by all these ridiculous regulations. Did you know they've outlawed human sacrifice? How are the people supposed to express their devotion if they can't occasionally sacrifice one of their children to me.” Then, of course, there is Eddie. “If there was any condition that gave a man carte blanche to lie down and take it easy for a bit, it was being shot five times in the chest with a nine-millimeter automatic pistol.” I could probably find hilarious quotes for every character in the book, and I haven't even addressed the main characters (Christine, Mercury, Horace Finch). The key word for this book is “hilarious”. I really do wish I'd been able to find my copy of Mercury Falls, because I've forgotten so much of it and thus am missing some of the references, but I managed to keep up okay.If you enjoy laughing, and if you don't take your religion too seriously (the Tawanis, for instance, make up a number of gods and goddesses just to mess with Horace Finch, such as Buwandanta—god of that thing where you are half awake and can feel yourself lying in bed but you can't move), then you'll really enjoy this series of books. I recommend them.Series Information: Mercury Rises is the second novel in the Mercury series.Prequel One: Mercury Begins, review linked here where formatting allowedPrequel Two: Mercury Swings, review linked here where formatting allowedBook 1: Mercury Falls, read in September 2010, review linked here where formatting allowedBook 3: Mercury Rests, to be read soon.Disclosure: I received a paperback copy of this book from Amazon Vine in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.Synopsis (from the back of the book): Fresh off their successful quest to thwart not one, but two diabolical plots to destroy the world, jaded reporter Christine Temetri and rogue cherub Mercury find that mysterious powers outranking even the Heavenly bureaucracy seem intent on keeping the Apocalypse on track.Mercury is generally well-intentioned, rarely well-behaved, and always well-armed with a droll remark. While the world is plagued by natural disasters and nations prepare for war, crazed billionaire Horace Finch plots to use a secret device hidden beneath the African desert to discover the deepest secrets of the Universe—even if he has to destroy the Universe to do it. Meanwhile, unassuming FBI investigator Jacob Slate tries to find a rational explanation for the mysterious destruction of downtown Anaheim—a quest that ultimately brings him face to face with the unhinged Horace Finch. Together, Christine, Jacob, and Mercury must stop Finch from activating the device and tearing reality to pieces.
    • 3/5
      Sequel to “Mercury Falls”, this book continues the story of the “heroic” cherub Mercury, who continues his (yo-yoing) career in the Apocalypse Bureau by generally playing both sides off against the middle and rebelling in a hundred different little ways. Mostly we see Mercury overseeing the building of Babylonian ziggurats (in 2000 BC); the relevance of this plotline doesn’t become clear until towards the end of the book when he teams up with journalist-turned-aid-worker Christine (whom he met in “Mercury Falls”) in an attempt to foil a plot by the Order of the Pillars of Babylon to take control all of space and time (even if they have to destroy the entire universe to do so!).In the meantime, we also meet scientist Jacob, who is investigating the Anaheim Event (the mysterious destruction of downtown Anaheim – which happens at the end of Mercury Falls). He discovers a puzzling underground tunnel fifteen miles in circumference, which turns out to be a Chrono-Collider Device (or CCD for short), but before he can discover what it is, or what it is for, he is kidnapped and whisked off to a remote part of Africa.Oh and don’t forget Eddie Pratt who is trying to find the manuscript for the seventh book in the highly successful Charlie Nyx series (about a young boy with a magical staff).Sounds zany? Yes, it is. And I can see why this book would appeal to a lot of people - it makes for an enjoyable read if you are willing to suspend your sense of the ridiculous and just go with the flow. And I will say that I did enjoy it.On the down side, the writing is terrible – pedestrian prose, too many characters and most of them very shallow and/or stereotypical, too much telling me what has happened instead of showing it as it happens, and far, far too many references back to the previous adventure.The humour is there, but does have a tendency to deteriorate into teenage boy mode. For instance there is no plot relevance at all to the scene where Noah is masturbating, and while I guess boys in the 11-14 age range will find it hysterically funny, for adult readers it warrants only a slightly sick smile.And lastly, the physics is terrible, the author shows a complete disregard for the basic geometry of a circle, and misuses words like “epicentre”. However, don’t let me put you off if you enjoy zany comedy fantasy in the Douglas Adams style, as this book does have a lot to offer. I would recommend reading Mercury Falls first though.