The Faith Machine By Tone Milazzo Book Review

Welcome to my stop on the amazing Storytellers On Tour Book Tour! As always drinks are complimentary, there is no curfew, so stay and have fun as long as you’d like. Please check out my cohorts events on this tour here!

Here’s all the links to buy the book for you and your friends!

Here’s Storytellers On Tour website. Go check out what they’re up to and planning in the coming weeks

Book Blurb (Tonight’s opening act)

Welcome to the dangerous, clandestine world of ESPionage. Welcome to The Strip, where operatives on the fringe command teams of ‘Cards’: Agents cursed with subtle, specialized, and sometimes sloppy psychic powers. Dr Ken Park, Korean-American psychologist and spy, dares to lead six of these Cards. Together, they tackle esoteric threats the Department of Homeland Security cannot.

Park takes his team to Africa to retrieve the Faith Machine. Built by the Soviets to turn prayers into suffering, the psychotronic device fell into the hands of a demented warlord. Tragically, the mission fails and the madman slaughters hundreds of innocents while the machine burns.

They return to the States in disgrace, and into an ambush by the mysterious and brutal Casemen. Cut off from command and each other, the scattered agents rush to their safe house in the west. While spy agencies from around the world want retribution for the catastrophe in Africa. Park’s team outplays enemies left and right, while uncovering the true threat. There’s another Faith Machine, one destined to bring hell on earth.

While the headliners are making their way to the stage, a few impotant notes:

I was provided an electronic copy of this book by the author and Storytellers On Tour in exchange for an honest review.

I want to thank SOT for including me on this tour. You guys are so cool and continue to promote some awesome books and their unique writers!

Finally, my review (The Main Event):

This will be more of a feel and free-form review.The blurb does a great job of giving you the story, but it was the characters differing personalities along with the strange events that occur along the way, that i hope to praise.

I really had fun with The Faith Machine, and almost missed this opportunity to read it. My life has been extremely hectic and busy lately. Finding time to read is a lot like finding my daughter’s barbie shoe she lost “somewhere” in the house, but ends up being found under a pile of stuff in the car.

However, I took the time to read the blurb in Justine’s last call for this tour and could not resist. From the great cover, showcasing a brain in a case, along with a variety of religous and spiritual symbols. To the blurb about the story itself with sloppy psychics, spies and the mix of genres was calling to me. Im glad I bit, too.

This story probably has more action in the first quarter of the book than you normally get from a Jackie Chan movie. I’m not a big action sequence or action film kind of guy but the way these characters and the unique abilities come into conflict with the bad guys is a blast. Sometimes, it’s punctuated by humor that could only come from someone with a truly unique sense for what’s funny.

I love weird and out of the way ideas, and Tone fills this book with them. There’s no genre it will easily fall into and the unexpected happens constantly. In fact, there’s almost a Carl Hiassenesqe genious in the writing that resulted in a fun book that kept my interest all the way through.

I loved that the chapters were short, as my attention span has been reduced to the level of my hyperactive 8 month old bloodhound. But it was the characters with the special abilities, or “Cards” that steal the show. We get to view a short, top secret document that details each person on the team, and what their Card is. Dr. Park, as their boss, comes to them, one by one, until his team of unusual spies are briefed, and ready to undertake a mission to recover a machine leftover from the cold war that allows Faith to become a weapon.

The skills these people have would seem to be more suited to performing at a circus, or making big bucks running a YouTube channel. But the writer weaves the skills to the situation and it all comes together with perfection.

To give one example is the girl who chews on a page of her Bible and suddenly becomes Thor, well, Thor without the muscles, the hammer, the godlike presence….what is left, you ask? The electricity of course, that she wields with mastery. Also the one who makes people around her stuck in place by the power of language, is used so fantastically in the story and was so funny at times.

After they survive a mission together in Liberia, they all go their separate ways back in the states. As each of them is caught off guard by men, with cases, Casemen, who are now hunting them, and seem to be wielding unique powers of their own. The rest of the story needs to be read, but I really enjoyed The Faith Machine, and look forward to the next book!

4 out of 5 Stars

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