A God-narrated thriller about an ancient calendar and the possible end of the world.
Two reporters on the trail of a murderer discover an ancient secret of global consequence in Davis’ debut mystery novel.
In 638, a Mayan astrologer calculates the year that the world will come to an end. In 1935, an archaeologist unearths a codex from beneath the tomb of the last great Mayan king. In present- day Washington, D.C., virtuosic high school student DiShannia Johnson Johns—who recently received the President’s Science Prize for research she conducted on the collapse of the Maya—is found beaten to death in an alley. Washington Post reporters Noah Scott and Kate Chien-Forest—whose challenges include PTSD and family issues, respectively—were already covering DiShannia’s achievements, so her murder feels personal to them. The autopsy proves that something strange is going on: “Two things killed her: the blow to her head was the immediate cause, but something was wrong with that pancreas, not diabetes, something induced.” The two set out to uncover who is behind her death, but the clues raise more questions than answers. The two journalists are soon caught up in a continent-hopping whirlwind of history, science, politics, and conspiracy, all of which point improbably toward an ancient Mayan prophecy about the end of the world. Davis’ prose is sharp and stylized, in part due to his choice to have the novel narrated by God—also known as the Potter—who turns out to be quite smarmy: “It’s true I have no name, or many. The unpronounceable Jahweh for example, the arrogance of I-am-who-I-am. Or Father, raising the specter of my gender, a laughable but understandable worry; humans are so—what’s the exact word here?—invested in gender and sex. Or God.” Davis tries a bit too hard to make everything seem epic, including the largely unnecessary device of using multiple timelines. The result is that the novel takes a while to get started. When it does, it’s engaging enough, though the content is somewhat less than original. Readers who go in for broad historical conspiracies will likely enjoy this offering for all its pretensions. Others will be better off passing it by.
A God-narrated thriller about an ancient calendar and the possible end of the world.Pub Date: April 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-970157-04-8
Page Count: 375
Publisher: Story Merchant Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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