A Savior Agent always has a chance.

With a pandemic called alternatively Bleeding Mouth Disease and the Red Death Virus, and deaths in the United States rapidly rising, a cure is enthusiastically sought. Within weeks a drug is found which, although it cannot help those already infected, does prevent the regular user from contracting the illness. A temporary organisation, the Strategic Agency Against Viral Infections by Organised Resistance (Savior) is established to ensure a peaceful distribution of the drug and to calm outbreaks of violence caused by desperation. It is successful. However, before Savior can be disbanded, a second outbreak of a mutated form of the virus occurs and the carriers are taken into quarantine holding camps, sometimes unwillingly, by the new organisation. As more and more people are forcibly interned, resistance grows and Savior acquires increasing powers until it has absorbed most other government agencies within it with almost unlimited rights of enforcement for everything.

ISavior had been successful, in part, by the use of genetically altering some of it's operatives with both physical enhancements and psychic abilities, the most powerful tools of this latter being the young people who survive the treatment to become sensitives who can read minds. The main story follows one team of Savior Agents, considered heros, who worked with one such sensitive, a teenager named Ghost.

Initially, however, the book starts with a first person monologue by a man plucked from a different time line, a Priest from a desert and primitive society, come from the future to 2001. This introductory chapter was fascinating and promised far more than the book later went on to deliver. The rest of the story is told from the different perspectives and times of the Savior team, moving in a seemingly random manner between the various protagonists. Although exciting in substance, it is certainly marred by this constant jumping about and the thriller becomes more of a puzzle with characterisations also being degraded by this too frequent movement in person and time.

Scott Berrier, the narrator, has a deep and pleasant voice, solid and well suited to the story. His performance of character dialogue is very good, distinctive and individual. His text reading, too, is clear and well cadenced, except where there is a sizable amount of text to be read when an annoying rising intonation occurs at the end of many phrases leading to a slightly musical, sing song impression rather distracting from the story. Overall, though, a good performance.

This book was a good idea, both in story content and even in the erratic presentation but it became too disconnected to fully follow with any ease as well as leaving unexplained loose ends. There is plenty of detailed fight action as well as a level of characterisation, and events even have a certain plausibility muddled in with the more extreme scientific tamperings. Tidied up, it could be an excellent read.
My thanks to the rights holder of Saviour for freely gifting me a complimentary copy, at my request, via Audiobook Boom. It was not what I had expected but I enjoyed it, nevertheless. It is different.

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