Audiobook Review: Prometheus Man by Scott Reardon

A man with no identity... hunting a man without limits.
When a pile of bodies is found in Paris, CIA Agent Tom Blake hustles his way onto a major case: tracking a man with enhanced abilities, the test subject of a secret government program.
There's just one problem: the man using Agent Blake's identity is not Agent Blake. He's Tom Reese, a man without a family or a home.
Reese is searching for his brother's killer. He stole Agent Blake's identity two months ago and has bluffed his way onto the team investigating his only lead. But his time as a CIA agent is accelerating toward its expiration date.
Soon the CIA will find out that Agent Blake is in two places at once. Soon the augmented man will come looking for him. And soon both will discover that Tom Reese carries a secret even he doesn't know about.
He is the last test subject of Project Prometheus.

Prometheus Man is a science fiction thriller that pairs action with mystery. Scientists have formulated an injection that enhanced abilities in mice. A human trial, however, has gone horribly wrong. The book definitely features some violence, as you might expect with a book that starts off with a pile of bodies.

Investigating those bodies is a CIA agent, who, well, may not be who he says he is. I have to say, someone posing as a CIA agent to just people on the street is one thing, but this guy? He is actually posing as a CIA agent to the CIA, actually working on a case. That’s takes a lot more guts and skill than just an average Joe could pull off. The question is, how long can he make it last? Long enough to track down his brother’s killer?

This story was interesting, and really kept me interested. I was quite curious to figure out all the details of what was going on as well as seeing just how long Tom could pull this off. Bonus points to this book for actually making me laugh out loud in a couple of places. That is incredibly rare, so I want to make sure to mention it.

I have to say, my only real complaint with this book may be that some of the lines were a bit politically incorrect. Sometimes when that’s the case, you can tell the author is trying to use it to make a statement that offsets the negative comments. I wasn’t sure I could see that in this book. It just felt like was a part of the character, which maybe true to the author’s vision, but at the same time I found it completely unnecessary. There were other ways to paint the character that way without potentially alienating readers that might be offended. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is only a very minor component of the book, most of it is not this way. I don’t want anyone to read my review and think this is a highly offensive book. It’s not even close, I am really just talking about a few borderline lines from the entire novel. But when it comes down to it, I just could not find justification. Maybe I’m just more sensitive, who knows.

This was an intriguing book, particularly for fans of thrillers. It features a rogue human experiment that is an efficient killing machine. It also has a protagonist out for vengeance, posing as a CIA agent. There were a few laugh out loud moments in this, which is rare for me.

Audiobook Note: I mentioned above, I laughed out loud a couple of times in this book. Maxweel Hamilton, the narrator, has to get some credit here for delivering the lines in a way that kept the author’s humor from feeling over done or forced. I feel he nailed the execution in a way to best represent the author’s words. Most of this book was not humor, and I feel the narrator did a good job with the rest of the book as well.