I often claim myself as someone mystery books are not for though I always like to be surprised now and then. So when I started The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sidney Sheldon last night, I set my expectation a little to nothing, read less than 30% of it, and left it at that. This afternoon, I picked it up again and somehow managed to finish the rest in three hours. My claim doesn't seem to suit this case but what can I say, I was bored (meaning: still have a lot of works to do but well they can wait) and this book turned out to be an unexpected good approach to welcome June.
The Doomsday Conspiracy follows the story of Commander Robert Bellamy of US Naval Intelligence who is ordered to handle a very secret mission with the help of no one. Robert isn't given much information though, he only knows that there's a crashing weather balloon that carries sensitive military information in Switzerland. To prevent data leakage, Robert needs to find all the witnesses and make them sworn to secrecy. However, weird things happen when Robert is trying to fulfill this mission. One by one, the witnesses admit that they saw a UFO instead of a weather balloon and they die suspiciously not long after. Unfortunately, Robert is late to realize it and he is now the last target of this operation.
The synopsis, along with my mom's recommendation, was the sole reason why I was intrigued in the first place, though I must admit The Doomsday Conspiracy turned out hooking me deeper than I had originally anticipated. Divided into two parts, this book explored the journey Robert had to go through in order to locate the witnesses as well as the part where Robert himself became the target. Contrary to the fact that the pace was quite fast, I was a little bored at first, though fortunately things started to get more captivating when the hunt began.
I didn't know exactly what to say about Robert's ability to locate all the targets. Considering he didn't have even the smallest clue like the number of the witnesses, it was either he's too lucky or too clever that he was capable to finish this mission. Furthermore, none of the clues he gathered throughout the first part of this book was misleading, so I maybe should've opted for a good fortune from his part.
I liked Robert's backstory with his ex-wife Susan as well as I did the ones about the witnesses. Regardless of how easy the hunting might seem, the first part of this book was quite memorable partly because of it. It's cool to see how Robert could take advantage of all the sources around him to indirectly help him in this mission, especially in the second part of this book where instead of being the hunter he was the prey. It was a thrilling part to go through as a reader who experienced it from his perspective. All things considered, I found this part more challenging and in fact very hard to put down.
In conclusion, the plot was intriguing. With a touch of sci-fi and true facts, The Doomsday Conspiracy was cleverly written and progressed, even though we could spot the bad guys pretty easily as they weren't too many characters here. However, I was sort of disappointed with how the ending turned out. It seemed to bring the conflict to an abrupt end while I still had a lot of unanswered questions about Susan, Monte Bank, and how some of them supposedly fit in this whole plot.
Despite my little disappointment, I still found this book enjoyable as a whole. I admired the premise and its thrilling mystery, though the ending could've been so much more than that. While we're at it, I also recently found out that The Doomsday Conspiracy was the original inspiration behind Dan Brown's thriller fiction works—how amazing of a fact it is?
