Falling and the Blind Mirror by Christopher Pike

In Falling, Matt Connor decides to fake his own death by jumping out of an airplane as it flies over the ocean.  Matt wants to get revenge on his old girlfriend, and he must appear to be dead before he can put his revenge plan in motion. Meanwhile, Kelly Fienman is an FBI agent who is investigating a serial killer, and later, an abduction.  Kelly's investigations gradually cause her path to cross with Matt's with an interesting twist.  

Pike had already used the idea of a character getting revenge by faking their own death in two books, Gimme a Kiss and Fall Into Darkness.  It's a fun plot, so why not do it again?  I'm impressed that Pike was able to reuse the same basic plot idea to create something entirely different.

This story has a lot of background information about both Matt and Kelly, but unlike Pike's other adult novels, the information is quite important to the plot.  The plot is fascinating as Matt and Kelly's separate stories begin to converge.

This is an excellent book.

In The Blind Mirror, David is walking along the beach when he discovers a body partially buried in the sand.  Later, David is shocked to discover that the body belongs to his old girlfriend, Sienna. Even more shocking is when Sienna calls David on the phone.  Nobody will believe him that Sienna is alive, and David learns too late that he is a victim of a conspiracy.

This story is really suspenseful and reads like a mystery.  This is a very good book.

Christopher Pike The Listeners and The Cold One

In The Listeners, FBI agent David Conner has been asked to investigate the Listeners, a channeling group that has knowledge of highly classified information.  David quickly falls in love with Lucy, who is a member of the group along with her twin sister.  Too late, David learns that the group has tapped into an ancient evil that is growing in power.

The entire first half of the book consists almost entirely of an excessive amount of background information.  The reader doesn't need to know about David's entire life history in extreme detail. The second half of the story finally gets to the point and should have been expanded into the entire book.

Parts of the second half of the story are easy to guess by anyone who has read Pike's young adult book, Spellbound.  There are some obvious parallels to that story.

The first half of the book is boring, and the second half is good but rather unsatisfying.

In The Cold One, journalist Peter Jacobs receives an anonymous phone call from someone who knows inside information about a series of grisly murders.  Peter suddenly finds himself in the middle of the case.

This is a pretty good book and does not have as much filler as Pike's other adult novels.  It was supposed to have a sequel, but that book was never written.

Christopher Pike Sati and Season of Passage

In Sati, Michael Winters picks up a female hitchhiker in the middle of the desert.  The hitchhiker's name is Sati, and Sati believes she is God.  Sati ends up staying with Michael, and she immediately captivates everyone who comes in contact with her.  Sati holds meetings, and soon she has a large number of followers.  But is Sati really God?

I did not enjoy this book very much when I read it around 25 years ago.  I don't care for it any more now than I did then.  The story is okay but not that great.  The problem is that the book is not horror but instead has a large amount of spiritual mumbo-jumbo.  Pike tends to lose me when he goes into his lengthy spiritual discussions.

In The Season of Passage, Lauren Wagner leaves on a mission for Mars.  The purpose of the mission is to discover what happened to the Russian mission that disappeared on Mars two years before.

When I read this book in 1995, I didn't notice anything off, but now, the story is dated.  The book is set in 2004, and the failed Russian mission was in 2002.  Everything mentioned in this book seemed logical by 1995 standards when I read the book in 1995.  Some events that occurred between 1995 and 2004 cause parts of this book to be impossible to take seriously.

For instance, the mission takes off in the space shuttle Columbia.  In 1995, one would have thought that Columbia would have still been in use in 2004, but as we know now, Columbia disintegrated during re-entry on February 1, 2003.  In retrospect, it would have been better for Pike to have used a fictional name, but who could have predicted that disaster?

The Mars part of the story is very creepy, suspenseful, and horrifying.  This is a true horror story.

I feel like one aspect of the ending was not wrapped up.  A character named Kathy has a sister who apparently came in contact with someone who has the Mars infection.  I guess she didn't get infected, but it's a gaping plot hole.

Another aspect that is tied in with Kathy's sister is also glossed over.  The infected person was said to be not interested in spreading the virus, so they didn't worry about finding and killing that person.  Um, okay...

This book has way too much expository information in the opening chapters.  That part of the book should have been shorter, and the ending part of the story should have been less rushed.  It's not logical to go after one infected person with great fervor and then just to assume that the other person will quietly go off and die without infecting anyone.  They shouldn't be unconcerned about the other person.

I figure that the entire human race becomes extinct shortly after the "happily ever after" conclusion of the story, since that other infected person is running amok somewhere.

This is an overall excellent story, but it is way too long.