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    China Lake: An Evan Delaney Novel
    Unavailable
    China Lake: An Evan Delaney Novel
    Unavailable
    China Lake: An Evan Delaney Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    China Lake: An Evan Delaney Novel

    Written by Meg Gardiner

    Narrated by Tanya Eby

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Evan Delaney is shocked to learn that her ex-sister-in-law, Tabitha, has joined the Remnant, a religion with a dangerous and fanatical following. What is more alarming is that the unstable young mother plans to regain custody of her son and disappear with him into the fold of the church. She has the Remnant on her side, and they'll do anything it takes-including murder-to get what they want. But it's another member of the Remnant who's killed, and when Evan's brother becomes a suspect, Evan is dragged even deeper into the nightmare.

    "From beginning to end, China Lake is a book no reader of thrillers will be able to put down. Great characters, dynamic plot, nail-biting action-Meg Gardiner gives us everything." -Elizabeth George

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 3, 2008
    ISBN9781423361213
    Unavailable
    China Lake: An Evan Delaney Novel
    Author

    Meg Gardiner

    Meg Gardiner is originally from Southern California, where she practiced law and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of five Evan Delaney novels as well as the Jo Beckett thrillers, The Memory Collector, The Liar’s Lullaby and The Nightmare Thief. She lives with her family near London.

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    Reviews for China Lake

    3.5/5

    102 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A new protagonist for me. Evan Delaney, attorney turned writer, has been given temporary custody of her nephew Luke. Luke's father (Evan's brother) is a Naval Aviator who is deployed to keep the world safe for democracy. His mother abandoned him because she could not abide the 'Navy way' of life. Mom subsequently joins a cult, which cult subsequently tries to kidnap Luke.Evan and her paraplegic boyfriend Jessie- another attorney become caught up in a series of rather 'suspend your belief' adventures as they try to return Luke to his father, now back from sea and stationed at China Lake Naval Base in the desert of California.The book becomes a combination of good cop/bad cop, Rapture meets Hollywood, biological warfare meets Top Gun. I enjoyed the story but found Evan's character really stretched my ability to believe any of this could really have gone down the way it is portrayed.
    • 4/5
      This reads like the first of a new series, featuring (female) amateur detective Evan Delaney. Evan is a lawyer, doing legal research and journalism, which evidently allows her to take a lot of time off to detect.One way of allowing an amateur to get involved in an investigation is to involve her family members, and this book does that very well. It is completely believable that Evan would want to protect her young nephew, who she's had custody of while his father (her brother) is on sea duty in the Navy, as well as her brother and his wife (or ex-wife).At first I was a bit annoyed at the flag-waving, duty-first, military-is-wonderful attitude, but it is a valid cultural choice as a setting and I think the author worked herself past it.Don't let blurb from Stephen King fool you; this is not that kind of thriller. There are no rabid dogs, ghosts, demon cars, or teenaged witchery. Other than a few possibly shaky scientific details which can be overlooked, there is nothing here but ordinary human evil, manipulation, and greed. Much of the evil is on the surface, obvious from the first paragraph, but there is also underlying evil in several forms and a few plot-twists I hadn't imagined. I was very happy with the denouement.I would recommend this book for cozy readers who don't mind a bit of "heroine in peril" and for those who don't mind their thrillers being a bit soft-boiled. I'll be watching out for more from this author and this detective.
    • 4/5
      At last an author who knows when something isn't a rodent. "Outlaw vigilantes of the genus Mustela" have a small but heroic role in this book. After the ultra violence that I was reading at the start of the year. the slow build in this one made a pleasent change as did the inteligent lawyer heroine. At last someone who responds to threats and dangers by going to the police and persuing legal action.The heroine is trying to prevent her nephew from being snatched by his mother The mother has fallen under the influence of a church that believes the end of the world is most definately nigh.But how nutty are they? The first person narrative means we take a while to find out. Instead with no early cutaways to evily cackling baddies we get some likable portraits of people in the enemies camp. It is carefully plotted and while there are the odd occasions when that first person narrative is strained and a third person adopted and characters might distort beneath the plot demands. I can give this one a thumbs up.
    • 3/5
      The story was good, but the narration was lacking in inflection and emotion. It seemed like the reader was bored at times, and all the voices seemed to sound the same.
    • 2/5
      I'm not able to finish this right now - it's well-written and very suspenseful, but too intense for me right now. I need something lighter. Therefore, I can't give it a reasonable review or rating.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book, I could hardly put it down!The suspense was built up throughout the book and their were some surprising twists towards the end.Some parts of the story seemed quite far fetched which was a shame. But all in all a very good thriller.
    • 2/5
      A young American sci-fi author and part time lawyer, Evan Delaney, is looking after her six year old nephew while her brother is posted to sea as a Navy pilot. The boy's mother, who disappeared some months before the book starts, reappears in all their lives as a member of an extreme religious cult known as The Remnant. The cult soon moves from picketing the funerals of AIDS sufferers to more deadly pursuits and Evan's family and friends all get caught up in the mayhem.

      I added this book to my bookmooch wishlist after someone posted the opening lines to the 4 Mystery Addicts reading group:

      Peter Wyoming didn't shake hands with people; he hit them with his presence like a rock fired from a slingshot. He was a human nail, lean and straight with brush-cut hair, and when I first saw him he was carrying a picket sign and enough rage to scorch the ground.

      Those lines hinted, to me, that a ripper yarn might follow. Alas, it was not, quite, to be.

      Although it had potential the book missed the marks that would have made it a great thriller for me. Along with the religious cult there's action aplenty (although quite a bit of filler too), conspiracy theories and a rejected high school crush that turns to adulthood revenge-seeking on a large scale. There are even rabid animals and impossibly cute children in peril but none of it is particularly innovative. And I am heartily sick of thrillers that portray the police/authorities collectively as either utterly incompetent knuckle-dragging morons or awesomely invincible supermen. For the record this book chose the first option but as I find both equally unconvincing the other would have been just as annoying.

      Once again, because this book lacked any compelling characters, I found myself being pernickety about things like obscure words used to show-off the author’s abilities with a dictionary and scenes that adding nothing but length. And these characters were just not interesting to me. The religious zealots were so over-the-top as to be laughable rather than scary. If you want terrifying religious nutters watch Louis Theroux’s 2007 documentary The Most Hated Family in America (about the people behind the military-funeral picketing Westboro Baptist “Church”) which sends chills down my spine precisely because the zealots are frighteningly normal rather than the caricatures that Gardiner has created. And the good guys aren’t a heck of a lot better here. Our heroine is frustratingly inconsistent (she believes the church members capable of starting a major biological war but not, apparently, of having enough skills to find out her boyfriend’s surname for example) and her brother is arrogant and seemingly incapable of having a coherent thought. Only Jesse, Evan's boyfriend, seems well-rounded and believable in the context of the book but as he gets most of the daftest lines and plot devices I'm not even that fond of him.

      In the end the plot had all the elements a thriller should have but they weren't tied together well and without any great characters it was just a standard hero-saves-the-world-in-the-nick-of-time-and-despite-the-plodding-authorities book.
    • 4/5
      The thing about the List Swap Challenge is that I get to read great novels chosen for me by Julie. China Lake is a great one too. From the very first page, Ms. Gardiner threw me right into the story.I enjoyed the characters. I liked Evan a lot. She was the kind of person I would like to be friends with. Down to earth, witty, a bit of a smart ass but a heart of gold. She was stubborn and willful. Thankfully that tenacity paid off. She was the ultimate hero. Jesse, Evan's boyfriend, was a bit annoying at times. I'm not a fan of characters who are omnipotent, overly opinionated and sanctimonious. At times Jesse was the poster boy. Brian, Evan's brother, was a bit like Jesse. He carried himself in a way that showed he was in-charge and the authority on all. Truthfully, I thought he was a jerk. The string of villains Ms. Gardiner brought to the table were fantastic. All equally creepy and delusional. I particularly liked Glory who with time I thought could have been a great ally to Evan. And with Evan's guidance, a strong resourceful woman. And then there is Luke. I liked Luke a lot. He was well spoken, smart, an old soul. I hated seeing all the trauma he had to go through. Thankfully Aunt Evan was there to protect him. What frightens me about this novel is how real it can be. How there are Christian zealous groups out there who can wreck havoc on the world in the name of Jesus. I think Ms. Gardiner wrote this novel in such a way that I experienced that terror myself. While I was reading this novel, I actually went on the Internet, searching for these kinds of groups to see how safe we are as a nation from them. This novel was chocked full of surprises. With every page there was a new surprise. Every corner led to more mystery, more thrills. I had no idea where she was going or how we would get there. It was a suspenseful journey, one that left me breathless in the end. One that had me wanting more adventures with Evan.
    • 5/5
      If you love suspense, you need to go out immediately and find a book by Meg Gardiner. Meg, you’ve been hidden in the UK for too long! I really enjoyed The Dirty Secrets Club, but this one was even better. At one point, Evan’s sister-in-law tries to illegally take back custody of her son while Evan is locked in the back of a police car, and I thought I was going to literally jump out of my seat! And that was just the beginning! This story of a cult gone crazy really makes you think about what we as a society can control, and what we can’t, especially as Evan tries to get help from the police, who don’t know whom to believe. And I never expected the final twist. I think I especially liked the quiet times in the story, where you got a real sense of Evan, Jesse, and Luke’s normal lives. So often you only see the characters in a suspense novel in the midst of chaos. I will definitely be reading (or listening to) more of these, likely sooner rather than later.
    • 2/5
      China Lake is Meg Gardiner’s first novel and you can tell. Her writing style was what I’ll call conversational; she’s trying to relate to the reader. Unfortunately, it seems that she thinks everyone else except her is a simpleton and her tone was, as a result, patronising at times. Strangely, one of the main characters complains about the ‘dumbing down’ of the American people, which I think Gardiner is contributing to. What was worse was that although she was trying to write something that was easy to read, she uses the most absurd words at times. A really absurd one was 'stupefaction' when 'astonishment' would have been more conversational. Nobody wants to read words that you expect to come out of the mouth of a stuck up, 1920s American high-roller’s wife. With her patronising tone, and these absurd words, it seems like she’s got something to prove to the literary world, which is extremely annoying.Evan Delaney, the heroine, and Jesse, her lawyer boyfriend are too smart-arsed and pretentious to be likeable and I was hoping throughout the book that somebody would give Jesse a swift kickbox to the head. Delaney is clearly based on the author, which suggests that Gardiner has written this book as a way of making her fantasies of leading an exciting life come true. The rest of the characters lack any true inspiration and I knew that Delaney’s fighter-pilot brother, Brian, would be wearing a white shirt and dog tags under his standard issue khakis before Gardiner told me exactly that. The plot is quite twisted and while at first the twists are predictable, towards the end, things pick up. In fact, the plot picks up so much that I got over my grievance with her writing style and was completely absorbed in the complex plot. Briefly, a fanatical church group called The Remnant has announced the end of the world and Delaney must save it. This theme is forgotten in the middle of the book however, when Delaney thinks that her nephew has been selected as the chosen one for their sinister plot. Gardiner remembers that the world is under threat about three quarters of the way through the book and the plot resumes.If you’re not too particular about the way something is written and you enjoy an intriguing plot and stereotypical characters, you’ll enjoy this book. However, if American grammar gives you the runs, this book is full of it. This review was originally published in On Dit, the student newspaper of Adelaide University.
    • 4/5
      So I was trolling around Mr. King’s site a few weeks ago and found an entry where he raves about an American author, Meg Gardiner, whose books are awesome but are published in the UK only, not the US. King laments this loss to the US readers, who can only get her books if they order them in. King compared her to Lee Child and Michael Connelly. As soon as you compare someone to Child, you intrigue me and you better be prepared for a fight. Luckily I am Canadian, and our bookstores carry a lot of UK books in stock. I was able to get 3 of her books in store, ordered the first one in and then - horror of horrors, the second book seemed unavailable (within a reasonable amount of time). I am a purist, and if there is a series of books I absolutely must read them in order or I feel I am doing the author and characters a disservice. I found a slightly used copy of the second book on eBay, and voilà, I was now armed and ready to read.While for me, Gardiner is certainly no Lee Child/Jack Reacher, her first Evan Delaney book, China Lake, is quite good and the main characters are certainly ones to enjoy another adventure with. I think King’s impassioned review of this book in this week’s Entertainment Weekly, is a bit hyperbolic though. I mean, the book did not change my life or stop my world from turning. However, I am now a little more than halfway through the second book, Mission Canyon, and am enjoying it even more than the first. I think the story is more controlled and closer to the main characters.Aside from his note on his website, King has now used his back-page column in this week’s Entertainment Weekly as a plea to readers to go out and demand access to Gardiner’s books. King is a smart one, his pleas have worked before, getting an audio book published for a much turned down author, and getting a CD made for a much turned down band. Let’s hope his plea works, and soon the American people can walk into one of their mega bookstores and pick Gardiner’s books off the shelf (well, the literate ones anyway).