The Artifact Enigma: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure by Judith Berens, Martha Carr and Michael Anderle is the first book in a (so far) three book series, The Daniel Codex. The back story and plot elements are mouth-watering: Magic is swarming over the earth because our magical sister planet Oricera now aligns fully to us and magical people now walk and live in our midst. At the same time our CIA is trying to understand a separate group of aliens, people from other planets outside our solar system.
Daniel Winters is a CIA agent because he wants to serve and protect at the same time he helps his grandfather with his combination magical oddity and antiques business. Daniel stumbles into a deep plot to do something with the aliens. In fact the CIA already erased one entire town after messing up with an alien meet and greet. Or something. Daniel really doesn’t know anything about this other CIA group’s motives or goals, but he decides to throw in with a rogue group dedicated to keeping us and the aliens and Oricera safe from trigger-happy CIA folks.
This sounds like it should be a great story, but The Artifact Enigma is flat. I feel no connection to any of the characters and it doesn’t appear that the authors tried to involve readers into the story. The plot moves fast with plenty of action, but even the action is subdued, distant, doesn’t feel real and left me just not caring.
The final sequence is particularly telling as Daniel becomes judge, jury and executioner for a gang trying to take over his neighborhood. After pages of high-minded yakking about duty and service and not wanting to kill people, our hero just walks into the gang house and kills everyone.
I doubt I’ll read any more of this series, although the plots sure sound tempting.
3 Stars
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