Maximal Reserve, by Sam Batterman – Book Review

Tweet var fbShare = {
size: ‘small’,
}

The beginning of February announced the release of Sam Batterman’s newest book “Maximal Reserve”.  Sam previously wrote the novel Wayback (I did a review on that title also), which ended up being a bestseller for Deep River Books.

Summary of the Book

What if Oil Isn’t Scarce?  A secret that can change the balance of the world’s power and finance in a moment is known by the most unlikely of people – and he’s only been employed for a week.

Philip Channing was just an ambitious college graduate who wanted to make his mark on the world.  He didn’t know that mark would be the greatest oil discovery of all time – in the wrong place.  Philip find the largest oil reserve in history, a reserve that dwarfs the lucrative reserves in Saudi Arabia and threatens to change the world’s balance of power and wealth in favor of the most unlikely country of all.

But Phil isn’t the only one who’s discovered the reserve – and an alliance of crooked politicians and terrorists will do anything to keep it secret.

My Review

The book begins with Philip’s friend Jack being murdered.  Somebody targeted him presumably for what he has discovered in all his computer data.  The character of Philip Channing is appealing; somehow even though he’s socially inept, deep in debt, and driving a jalopy, he comes across as utterly charming.  Now he has the offer of a dream job, but it’s not quite exactly how he thought it would be.  He has a girlfriend, Lisa, who works for the Governor of Texas, and receives disturbing information about some possible illicit activities that he’s involved in pertaining to the oil industry.  And of course moving forward, you know all of those things really are tied together in the plot of the story.

Maximal Reserve is not an ‘easy’ read.  It’s interesting, but quite technical.  I actually liked it for the geology information and theories it held within the pages, and to me the story itself was actually a side-line to that!  I admire and applaud Sam Batterman for ‘writing outside the box’, as penning a Creation based novel with authority in the 21^st century is not an easy task.

It’s true that there are some weak parts of the book, from some of the characters’ traits to predictability on where the story is going, but Maximal Reserve has a pretty decent chance at being the next best Christian Fiction book.  It’s certainly among the more engrossing books that I have read over the years.

Maximal Reserve is available on Amazon.com as both a paperback and Kindle book.

In keeping with FTC rules,  I am disclosing that I was contacted on behalf of Sam Batterman, who asked for my participation in sharing this information, and have a connection to him as he supplied a book for my review.

var idcomments_post_id = ‘231’
var idcomments_post_url = ‘http://www.threedifferentdirections.com/blog/maximal-reserve-by-sam-batterman-book-review.html’;