Frank E. Peretti Value Pack: This Present Darkness/Piercing the Darkness/Prophet Book

I have a bone to pick with 2,721 Goodreads.com readers, who gave this book an average rating of 4.01. How can that possibly be? The writing was terrible, the plot was the same as hundreds of other hackneyed plots and the characters were so stereotypically flat that it was laughable. It's essentially the story of what would have happened if Saddam Hussein had actually developed and deployed a nuclear weapon. Of course the book was first published in 2002, so I'll forgive the author for being totally wrong on his estimation of Iraq's capabilities (he was fooled like the rest of the world). So it's easy for me, with perfect hindsight, to knock the writer for taking 1 plus 1 and coming up with 50. But it seems like the writer was so keen on rushing the book to press (while there was still a huge anti-Saddam frenzy) that he forgot a couple of small details, such as a creative plot, characterization, and making the story believable with any sort of logic.

I must say, however, in defense of you wonderful Goodreads members, very rarely am I misled by you. If you say the book deserves a 4, it typically is excellent. And if you say it's a 2, I stay away from it.

In the end, it looks like Saddam led more than the weapons inspectors astray.