The Zero Game

Great story line with enough twist to keep you on your toes the whole time with a fantastic job of ending and wrapping everything up in a nice bow excellent book will be reading more of Brad meltzer work

This one is a pretty decent airplane read. Meltzer has moved past writing this kind of legal potboiler over the last ten years -- they started his career but he really doesn't write them anymore. As is usual for this kind of book, the plot revolves around wild governmental conspiracy theories (which have unfortunately taken on the ring of truth in the post-November 2016 world), and two-dimensional characters who have to turn themselves into action heroes for a 72-hour stretch of their lives.Meltzer as a legal writer was in the lower end of the genre. His prose is merely functional and the plot relies on a number of visible contrivances. As in his similar "The Book of Lies", the bad guy has an almost superhuman capacity to read his opponent's mind. survive long falls and point-blank gunshots without even flinching, and be in two places at once; he carries a weapon that delivers almost instant death and is untraceable by autopsy. The good guy is an average Joe who turns out to be the target of an elaborate, long-running conspiracy, a desk-job shlub who turns out to have the physical stamina of a body-building marathon MMA black-belt.There are some clever bits that makes this one difficult to put down, at least. Meltzer uses two different first-person narrators, one for the first few chapters and a second for the rest of the book, but also includes several third-person chapters from the POV of the relentless bad guy. He takes us deep inside historic buildings (here, the US Capitol), showing off all sorts of catwalks and secret passages and sub-basements, and of course the characters know all this hidden geography even without having been in the building before."Zero Game" gets far on cleverness and wit, even though it's ludicrous. Like I said, these sort of government conspiracies aren't much fun to think about anymore; Meltzer may have thought he was writing an over-the-top, too-good-to-be-true thriller, but truth has now far outpaced fiction.

The author does a great job of keeping you guessing with some great plot twists.It all starts with a game being played by Senate and Congressional staffers betting on the outcome of certain unimportant issues. Then it all turns deadly and it all points back to a defunct gold mine. In order to survive two staffers must discover the secret of the mine and somehow blow the whistle on what seems to be a huge conspiracy.

The Zero Game refers to a game where Capitol Hill staffers try to put pieces of legislation into law. The person who bets the most, must then make that happen. So when a harmless, tapped gold mine is put into play, Harris' friend Matthew, who's Rep. is on the Appropriations committee, bets everything he's got--then is killed. Harris decides he must figure out what's going on. So Harris gets Viv, a 17-year-old Capitol page, involved and before you know it, they're flying cross country in a Gulfstream (claiming to be on a trip for a Senator) to enter this mine 1.5 miles deep. They don't understand what they discover, but end up making an appointment back in DC with a scientist with the NSF. All the while, they're being chased by a highly skilled killer (but not highly skilled enough to kill our two main characters, of course)."The Zero Game" started off intriguingly, went off in a rather odd tangent, then came back and finished pretty strongly. Unfortunately, a good bit of it was pretty implausible. The relationship between Harris and Viv was quite unbelievable. And the chases within the Capitol itself...I mean, c'mon. There's no security cameras in parts of the Capitol? Really?In the hands of someone like Crichton (RIP) this would have been a much better book. Not that this is bad, it's just not that great.

It took me a while to get into this because I was not into the careful description of the game played by the Senate and House staffers. I realized later it was important to understand as the plot progressed. By the middle I was hooked and it just got better from there. It was great; definitely worth your time. Murder and intrigue between the good guys and the bad guys....and the reader really cannot tell which is which. There was even an unexpected twist at the end that was surprising. Great descriptions of how the House and Senate really operated, and what the "basement" of the capital building looks like. I loved it!

Interesting and even educational to some extent. Lots of turns in the action, but some events are not fully explained and some challenge the reader credibility.For me personally it was interesting to read about the descent in Homestead mine. I had a chance to visit the mine while it was still active and go down to the middle level. The mine was well maintained, well lit, I was wearing the full mining gear, but it was not really a pleasant experience.

Zoom zoom or something like that. The action was fast. Parts of this story wound me up tight and threw me down hard. There were some really gutsy themes or are they tropes, almost a GOT kind of a gotcha. Early on I thought the story was going soft but then there was a wow. I have a problem with fiction that sets its plot within reality then drops over the edge. FYI the deepest spot in a cave as per Google is 6600 feet. Not 8000 feet, for you this is not really a spoiler but for me an annoyance. Good story otherwise.

Politics!! What else does one expect? This statement in itself can generate political comments. The time line was pretty hectic and unrealistic but the plot was good. Meltzer points out that there are crooks at all levels of society and government and not to trust any of them. By society I'll include the religious society since they'll lie and hide behind the bible.

A good read

Have all of Brad's books now. Very easy reading and thrilling stories. Keeps you guessing...

The book arrived on time and well packed, in exactly the condition described on the ad. This is a good vendor - I've done business with them in the past and I'll do so again.

Good

I enjoyed the storyline and found it exciting, kept me interested to the end which had a good twist. Only downside felt the description in some of the chapters a bit overdone.