I was given an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of the upcoming novel The Tesla Testament by Eugene Ciurana. The book isn’t due to be published until october of 2006, but I wanted to share my impressions of the book.

The novel centers around freelancer Francis Montagnet, who besides doing his regular jobs as software consultant and his Muay Thai training, he sometimes takes the not-so-clean jobs of some intelligence agency I rather not mention. This time (it is the second novel Eugene writes about Francis), he has to stop a terrorist organization called Enbeaath, or Rebirth Alliance, from obtaining some stolen classified documents that detail the inventions of Nikola Tesla, a genius who understood electricity a little too much, and whose inventions got confiscated and deemed classified "Top Secret" by the FBI after his dead, in 1943.

I must confess that when I usually read novels, I go mostly for the Sci-Fi/Fantasy themes. However, I’ve also enjoyed books by Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton and Dan Brown (the usual suspects), and if I were to classify Eugene’s book, I would probably put it in the ‘Tom Clancy meets Dan Brown’ section, mixing espionage themes with a lot of historical facts about Tesla.

I found reading The Tesla Testament to be rather enjoyable. Francis is a regular guy, intelligent but very human. He’s not the suave Hollywood-Bond type (I haven’t read any of the Ian Flemming novels, but I hope Flemming’s Bond is a little less vacous), but a more down-to-earth guy who wants to survive in a very dangerous situation. Francis is a guy who doesn’t play fair, he plays to win.

The novel is well written in my opinion, and it is hard to put it down at night as you want to keep reading about what’s going to happen next. I found a couple of really small flaws (continuity errors), but fortunately since this is an ARC, I was able to point them out to Eugene and he has fixed them, so I expect the final print edition to come out really nice. The climax of the novel seems to end just a little too soon for me, as I wanted a longer confrontation between the good guys and the bad guys, but that’s probably just me. I guess it speaks good about a novel that you want to keep reading it even after it has finished.

I hope the book sells well, so Eugene keeps writing more about Montagnet.

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