Intriguing first novel about an Afro-Caribbean religion, by the author of The Cuban-American Experience and The Mexican Border Cities (not reviewed). Miami homicide's Lt. Osvaldo GutiÇrrez, a class act as a detective, comes into two cases of similar ceremonial murder, pointing to the Santer°a—a cult that usually practices white magic and sympathetic (homeopathic) magic. But these particular murders, involving iron pots filled with magnets, goat blood, and railroad spikes, along with the placing of a decapitated head stolen from a graveyard, suggest otherwise. GutiÇrrez is fairly knowledgeable about such practices but consults the expert on them, Professor Henry J. Krajewski, author of Santer°a in Cuba: Persistence and Change in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Krajewski is helpful as he meanwhile also sends his Cuban-American grad student, Miguel Calder¢n, to see professor Rosa Garc°a-Mesa, herself an expert on Santer°a, since that is Miguel's current interest toward his thesis. Rosa shows Miguel her special holy room, chockablock with Santer°a relics favoring her chosen god, Shang¢, the terrible trickster masculine sex-god. Later, while visiting a bot†nica where cult items are sold by the towering 300-pound giant Hern†n, Miguel meets and falls in love with the gorgeous Ileana. A third murder occurs with the ritual death of Candyman, a minor drug dealer. When we discover that Krajewski and Rosa once had a child together in Cuba, that the child died, and that Ileana later was named after her, the story thickens, with either Ileana or Miguel seemingly set up to be the new ritual victim. The two—can't imagine why—decide to work with Lt. GutiÇrrez to thwart the plot. Neatly told, nice love interest, fairly mild melodrama, and rich backgrounds on occult and voodoo practices.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55885-096-1
Page Count: 197
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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