The Three Secret Cities by Matthew Reilly

Publisher's Synopsis

A SHADOW WORLD

When Jack West Jr won the Great Games, he threw the four legendary kingdoms into turmoil.

BEHIND THE REAL WORLD

Now these dark forces are coming after Jack...in ruthless fashion.

CRASHING INTO OUR WORLD

With the end of all things rapidly approaching, Jack must find three incredible lost cities of legend.

It's an impossible task by any reckoning, but Jack must do it while he is being hunted...

My Review of The Three Secret Cities by Matthew Reilly

Jack West Jr continues to be called upon to save the world and, after succeeding in winning the Great Games and writing his name as the 5th Great Warrior, saving the world from annihilation in the process, he’s at it again. The Three Secret Cities carries on the story from where the previous book left off and charges ahead on yet another mission to ensure the world is safe from untold misery and destruction.

As has become the norm with the series, West, along with his band of intrepid heroes, must decipher cryptic clues, discover sites from myth and legend, battle a team of assassins and stave off his enemies who are all hellbent on ending his life.

The consistently great thing about Matthew Reilly books, and the Jack West Jr series in particular, is that nothing is ever done by halves. When a bounty is placed on Jack’s head, the team of assassins lets nothing, and I mean nothing!, stand in their way in their efforts to take him out. If that means destroying half the buildings in Venice, fair enough. Cleaving a New York City building in half and dropping it into the Hudson? Seems reasonable. Using a helicopter to pick up a London bus filled with people and dropping it into the Thames to lure Jack into the open? Well, I wouldn’t expect anything less!

So, anyway, the fate of Earth and all who dwell on it is still sitting on a knife’s edge with the possibility of a cataclysmic event that can only be averted by placing three precious items in three pre-assigned slots within three secret cities. It’s up to Jack and his mates to avoid being killed, tortured or maimed by hideous reprobates and still get to the assigned locations within the ridiculously tight deadline schedule.

As we get deeper into the series, the stakes are getting higher and the chances of Jack’s allies getting through unscathed is diminishing. (There will be some serious time on the psychiatrists’ couches required after this little excursion, let me tell you).

To ratchet things up a notch, too, is a guest appearance from another character from Reilly’s other major series, the Scarecrow series, who manages to achieve some Jack West Jr type of heroics in the course of this adventure. Fans of the Scarecrow series will be thrilled to see the return of this particular go-getter.

From New York to Venice, from London to Cornwall, the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela and Iceland the action never lets up with an all out battle between good and evil playing out across the entire world. Reilly’s endless supply of cliffhangers continues to know no bounds and there always seems to be a new adversary on hand to replace the previous one, more ruthless and dangerous than the last.

You’ve got to hand it to Matthew Reilly, his ability to incorporate myth and legend with the historical mysteries of mankind is impressive. The fabled El Dorado and Atlantis, the mythical Medusa, the fictional Excalibur are all given important roles in Jack’s universe.

As has been pointed out over and over throughout this series, you don’t read a Jack West Jr book for the realistic scenarios and anything like believable feats of heroism. It’s all about the thrills, spills, a dollop of myth and perhaps within the neighbourhood of some real science and then it’s action, action, action. And The Three Secret Cities once again delivers the ultimate in escapist fiction.

Reviews From Elsewhere

Bookreporter.com

Jack has a well-trained and extremely loyal team working with him. He will need each and every one of them to be at the top of their game if they are to triumph against the legion of evil that has marked them for death. The villain known simply as the Slave King represents one of the initial hurdles to get over in order to move up the ladder from a business perspective. Slave King and others will soon be in competition with Jack and his teammates as they are able to decipher the mandate from the ancient Greek god Zeus, who was known for referencing the Three Secret Cities. Read full review.

For Winter Nights

The Three Secret Cities is the fifth novel in Matthew Reilly’s Jack West series of thrillers and it follows hot on the heels of The Four Legendary Kingdoms. I don’t think you should read one without reading the other because these books have told a great saga, taking place over many years, and the end is almost in sight. But first Jack West must take on the most formidable enemies who will stop at nothing, will kill anybody, to get what they want – a dead Jack West and world dominion. Read full review.

The Eloquent Page

I don’t think I can stress this enough, the action in The Three Secret Cities is unrelentingly bonkers. I mean that as the highest of compliments. There are pitched gun battles all over the place, tower blocks collapsing in on themselves, death defying halo drops and world famous landmarks being obliterated. It’s all in a day’s work as far as Jack West Jnr is concerned. Read full review.