Humorless and breathless yet long-winded thriller, drowning in symbology.
The latest addition to the Oh-No-We-Got-Christianity-All-Wrong thriller genre, from a pair of Barcelona natives.
This time the artist whose works hold the key to the hijacking of Western religious civilization is the Catalan architectural genius Antonio Gaudí, whose psychedelic Art Nouveau buildings are part of the fabric and glory of Barcelona. Doctoral candidate María Givell and her dashing, brilliant boyfriend Miguel, a mathematician and swordsman, are sent on the hunt for the solution of Gaudí’s symbolic message to the Catholic world by María’s grandfather Juan. Juan, succumbing to the horrors of Alzheimer’s disease, is living his last days in a nursing home where the dutiful María visits him as often as she can. Before the darkness closes over him completely, Juan tells her the fantastic story of his childhood relationship with the architect and of their involvement with the mysterious Knights of Moriah, who guard a fabulous relic from the pre-Christian past. Before he was shoved into the path of a Barcelona streetcar, Gaudí steeped the lad in the mysteries of the knighthood and of his works, and Juan needs desperately to pass those mysteries on to María, who is destined to take up the cause. Doing so will place the lass in mortal peril. The Knights of Moriah have enemies in Barcelona, a small army of hereditary villains whose mission is to foil the Knights in their quest to correct the historic and very basic errors of Christianity. María and Miguel can scarcely believe the old man, but a flurry of bullets from bad guys who look strangely like carvings on the Sagrada Familia cathedral and the subsequent murder of the grandfather convince them to start solving the string of riddles that hold the solution to Juan’s mystery. Their allies are a spunky Japanese art scholar whose mobster boyfriend has ties to the dark side, and Cristobal, a giant cabdriver with ties to his saintly eponym.
Humorless and breathless yet long-winded thriller, drowning in symbology.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-143491-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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