"Madison's summary nails it: 'Murder, madness, and greed swirled around me like a Mojave dust devil.' You go, girl."
Returning from the dead for yet another encore, two headline-making names, boy king Tutankhamen and megaselling Robbins, partnered once again by living collaborator Podrug, power another case for antiquities investigator Madison Dupre.
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"Madison not only fails to garner any reader sympathy, she comes off like a man in drag, stuck in a plot hindered by details that seem added as page filler, but the novel picks up once she flees the country for Europe—though the reader may not hang on long enough to pass through customs."
Podrug (The Devil to Play, 2006, etc.) pens another tale for the estate of long-deceased writer Harold Robbins, of The Carpetbaggers fame, and explores the dirty underbelly of antiquities procurement.
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"Podrug's strong, crisp style excels at description, particularly in the Russian scenes."
Robbins's sixth posthumous novel finds new co-writer Podrug outwriting the hormonal old ghost, as was the case with Sin City (2002).
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Hormonal Harold, hale and hearty though dead since 1997, returns with his fourth-and-a-half postmortal novel. We number 2001's Never Leave Me as a half, since it's a reprint of Avon's censored 1954 paperback, the lust and sex restored by Forge.
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Though he died in 1997, Robbins continues to pour out novels of fabulous vulgarity to equal The Piranhas (1991). How does he do it? With an anonymous cowriter fleshing out "a rich heritage of novel ideas and works-in-progress," of course.
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"Sure to work for those sex-starved, homesick, hungry ghosts Robbins now writes for, who can grab only steam, not their cheeks or other parts, when the novel ends with 'a first-class blow job.'"
Following his death in 1997, Robbins's hard-driving, spiritually empty The Predators (1998) turns out not to be his farewell novel.
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"Despite the author's customary surfeit of clinical sex scenes, this is a limp and linear take on cafe-society capitalism—one that ends not with a bang but a whimper."
Another dreary, sex-drenched saga in which Robbins (The Stallion, 1996, etc. etc.) does his roman Ö clef number on broadcasting.
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"With more couplings than a railroad switchyard—and about as much reality as a dude ranch."
On the evidence of this sequel to The Betsy (1971), schlockmeister Robbins has lost whatever knack he may once have had for down-and-dirty storytelling.
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"If only the plot were as impressively hung as the men."
It's 34 years since The Carpetbaggers ignited Robbins's fame, but the familiar scandals, sex, and skulduggery in this late- breaking sequel have cooled to room temperature.
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A novel that wavers between fireball excitement and abysmal vulgarity, that leaves the reader dazed with complexities and a feeling that greater spiritual health might have resulted through never having read it—though zillions will.
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