Season of the Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) by Michael R. Hicks

Description: 
You Are What You Eat
 
At a genetics lab where a revolutionary strain of corn is being developed, FBI Special Agent Jack Dawson's best friend and fellow agent is brutally murdered, his body torn apart.
 
Jack is convinced that Naomi Perrault, a beautiful geneticist and suspected terrorist, is behind the murder. But when Jack is framed for setting off a bomb that devastates the FBI lab in Quantico, Naomi becomes Jack's only hope of survival.
 
Confronted by the terrifying truth of what the genetically engineered seeds stolen by his friend are truly for and who is really behind them, Jack joins Naomi in a desperate fight across half the globe to save humanity from extermination...

Review 4 of 5 Stars

Anyone who reads this blog knows that  I'm a Michael R. Hicks fan. I fell in love with the In Her Name series and have not only read, but re-read those books. So I came into this book with a love of the writer's work and great hopes. I did enjoy Season of the Harvest. It won't be a book that I re-read over and over, but as a writer I was intrigued through much of it and completely understand how you get from researching food allergies to alien story about GMOs.  It just happens.  Something grabs your attention, you start investigating and researching your topic and the next thing you know it is ever-present in your thoughts and the imagination machine starts turning.  

I too have done a lot of research into GMOs and I was curious how it would shake out in a sci-fi story, but there are a couple of reasons that I had not read this book earlier. The first of those is that I'm not a big conspiracy theory fan in fiction or in real life for that matter and that tends to influence my feelings about such stories. The second was that I loved the In Her Name series so much and didn't want to be disappointed if I couldn't make my way past the conspiracy theory element.
I know. There is that nasty conspiracy theory dislike rearing its ugly head again, but I did enjoy several things about this book.  The bad guys were truly formidable, truly fascinating structurally and I definitely wouldn't want to encounter them. There was plenty of action, the story moved along at a good pace and I was also interested in the gene manipulation to a point. Lastly, I loved the cats probably just because I love cats. On several occasions the cats and their warning behavior as well as the bad guys' feelings about the cats kept pulling up visions of the Mummy movies with Brendan Fraser.  However, I must say that Alexander (lucky little critter that he is) was one of my favorite things about this book and I was pulling for him. 

I enjoyed the book for the most part, but this was a 3.5 to 4 reading experience for me (I always round up when undecided). Some of it was really interesting, but the ending didn't quite do it for me as the president didn't seem realistic in what he was doing and the deals he wanted to make. I don't want to give too much detail as I try to avoid spoilers, but the ending just didn't ring true for me even in a fictional sense.  In fact, several of the characters just seemed a little off (perhaps overly dramatic) and the romance was too immediate for me when what it might have been in real life is the oh crap we might die, hey you're kind of cute thing. I liked Renee's character as well, but with regard to some of the others I hate it when characters know there are bad things going down, their equipment inconveniently won't work and they do something stupid on top of it.  It's kind of like in a horror movie after three people have died and they decide to walk in the dark through the forest down to the lake and you can almost hear the audience screaming at them to go back. There was some of that to this book and I just couldn't get past the end even though it wasn't necessarily rushed or anything like that. 

So there you have it from my view. If you like conspiracy theory stories, especially ones that have to do with aliens then this may be just your kind of book. I will continue to follow Mr. Hicks' writing because he has become one of my favorite new authors and I really enjoy his work. Even Robert Heinlein who was one of my all-time favorite writers had a story or two that didn't particularly interest me and that is how I feel here as the majority of what I didn't like about this book really comes from my own likes and dislikes along with some overly dramatic moments more so than the story itself. It was an interesting read and I enjoyed it, but I doubt that I'll be following this particular series given the reasons already explained (perhaps overly so) above.