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Sledgehammer by Paulo J. Reyes
01/12/2006 . Source: Donna Jones 
pub: Virtual World Publishing. 200 page enlarged paperback. Price: $14.95 (US). ISBN: 0-97713870-4. Buy Sledgehammer in the USA - or Buy Sledgehammer in the UK  check out website: www.virtualworldpublishing.com and www.pauloreyes.com
Dr. Max Kroose, ER physician and recently widowed father of two, wakes up one morning and knows from that very moment that today is not going to be a good day. In fact, he keeps ignoring his instincts that are ringing alarm bells and carries on in his demanding role.
Even when his son takes a fall at school, Kroose is too busy to pick him up and continues working with an odd walk-in case that is looking more and more like a disease that has been eradicated for decades.
But the closer he looks and the more he starts to listen to his nagging voice in his head, the more Max realises that a deadly strain of smallpox has just been found in his hospital and it appears the disease was started deliberately!
Upon my initial reading of this book, I liked it. I thought the character of Kroose was realistic and dimensionally dynamic for the story and his interactions with his housekeeper and son were endearing and warmed me even more to his personality. But that's where my praise stops.
Unfortunately, the book spirals into a repetitive formula of adding the problems and pressing the point that Kroose should have realised something bad was going to happen. Over and over again, the final lines of the chapters take on this should have listened to instinct tone and it gets a bit tedious.
As for the characterisation of other people in 'Sledgehammer's mix. Well, they seem to be a cardboard cut-out display rather than a well thought out supporting cast. Reyes slips into the police photo-fit method of description rather than endearing us to Kroose's staff and detesting his superiors. Colour of hair, approximate height a few nods to the persons basic character and we're assumed to be able to remember who all these people are.
'Sledgehammer' also falls into another trap. The medical jargon throughout is more at home in a medical text rather than a piece of fiction and unless you have worked within medicine, these jargon fuelled passages would get confusing rather quickly.
The book takes place over the course of five days where several key scenes take place, one of which including the financial pulling of the staff immunisation programme against smallpox. Now I realise this is a key element in this story but could we not have had a flashback or some other imaginative way to include this information? It's just you get to a point with reading this book, that it's all too coincidental and just serves it's purpose for the writer. This kind of writing fails to excite me and becomes a bit dull after a while.
Even before we get embroiled into the story, Reyes gives us all the information we need to know about the possibility of a bio-terrorist attack of this type. This is all given in the preface. A word of warning: It's a bit unfortunate that it wasn't placed as an afterword, because from word go you've been given most of the details of what will happen in this story before hitting the first chapter.
I realise what this book was written for. Reyes really does find the idea of a bio-terrorist attack frightening and he wants to tell everyone about it before it happens. I believe one famous author tried to do the same about the possibility of a terrorist attack using hijacked planes, he wasn't listened to neither and we know what happened in reality.
In part, a potentially great book to thrill and keep you on your toes. Sadly, overall, the lack of depth to characters and plot that it fails to stand up as a book to go out of your way to buy.
Donna Jones
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