Review: ALIEN HUNTER THE WHITE HOUSE

Alien Hunter The White House
Written by Whitley Strieber
Published by Tor
April 2016
Hardback, 286 pages

I have finally finished the third book in Whitley Strieber’s Alien Hunter series. I’m glad that I had the opportunity to a complete collection of books, but I can also say it couldn’t happen soon enough.

We meet up with Flynn Carroll a few years after the events of the last book. He’s moved to Washington D.C. and is deeper into the unnamed government agency. Aliens are still the threat, but they’ve upped their game. This time it’s on the international chess board and Flynn knows they’re deep into different governments, but how and why, he’s unsure. The knowledge we gained about the alien technology from the previous book comes into play. We find out how they are using it to manipulate humanity. During this discovery, Flynn gains an unlikely ally who has just as much to lose if the aliens succeed. Slowly the pieces come together and it becomes a race against time to stop them.

Like the last two books, the action starts immediately and doesn’t slow down. I have no issue with this, as it’s a way to get the reader sucked into the story quickly. I knew that this book would be a ride like its predecessors. However, since I’ve read the first two books recently, I’ve picked up on Strieber’s formula, at least with these. The farther I got into the book, the more predictable it became. I’m sure if I were reading these as they were released it would be less obvious.

Not only was the structure of the book predictable, but so was the final outcome. I feel Strieber made the “villain” too obvious with the description of this character and their history with other characters. With the first two books, I felt he threw a few curves, but not here. In the last book, I enjoyed Flynn’s side trip and it made sense for the movement of the story. This book’s side journey…I’m still trying to best figure out how it helped move the story forward except to give us a great action sequence.

I’ve enjoyed the three books, probably in the order of Underworld, Alien Hunter, then White House. I’m sure that if Strieber wrote a fourth Alien Hunter book, I would get around to reading it, but I would hope that he would mix his formula up a tad and throw the reader for a loop.