Sam Batterman's "Wayback"

I finished reading Sam Batterman's Wayback, and I've posted the review at Amazon (may take a while before it's visible, though; Amazon publishes reviews anywhere from immediately to 48 hours later). It's a great story about a "what if" -- what if the Biblical account of creation and the flood found in the book of Genesis were true -- and scientists had the means to verify it?

Batterman mixes science, action, history, a little romance -- and serves up one powerful story.

What impressed me the most, though, was his ability to describe settings -- the landscape. I was in that control center where the scientists have congregated. I was seeing the antedeluvian world for the first time, feeling and inhaling the water-saturated atmosphere and shocked, like the characters, at seeing herds of dinosaurs. I was walking the streets of Jersualem right before the Six-Day Way begins in 1967. I was running with the crew down the streets and into the sewer of the ancient city that doesn't know it's doomed. The detail is amazing, representing some exhaustive research. In the case of the antedeluvian world, the descriptions and detail are speculative but no less real.

Batterman, in his first novel, is clearly a master of setting of the scene.