While the story is more than satisfying for fans of the historical conspiracy game, Reading brings more nuance, substance...
A struggling writer and a mysterious assassin take opposing sides in a race to discover a lost prophecy.
This European bestseller by Nostradamus expert Reading (The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus, 2009, etc.) delves deep into the history of the famous French seer. But the novel’s literary merit and historical assessment don’t come at the cost of suspense and action. The novel opens in Paris, where Reading’s fictional doppelgänger—American writer Adam Sabir—is chasing down a flimsy Internet lead. A gypsy con artist and drug addict named Babel is teasing Sabir that he has possession of the lost prophecies of Michel de Nostradame, who completed 942 out of a planned 1,000 quatrains of his predictions. But before Sabir can ferret out the truth, the gypsy slices open his hand and marks Adam’s head with a bloody print. Following Babel’s mysterious clues—“Two words. Remember them. Samois. Chris.”—Sabir makes his way to Samois-sur-Seine, where he meets the Manouche gypsy tribe that protects their own. Babel, meanwhile, has been brutally murdered by the villainous Achor Bale, an assassin trained by his mother to protect the history that Nostradamus predicted. His mysterious organization is Corpus Maleficus, a cult trying to protect a Third Antichrist, a malevolent figure following Napoleon and Hitler. Hot on the trail of both is Joris Calque, a veteran police officer who’s trying to flush out the American fugitive and the body count from marking all of Europe. In a fascinating and tense exchange, Sabir is forced to undergo a risky gypsy trial called a Kriss, after which he finds himself responsible for Yola Semana, Babel’s unmarried sister. Together, Yola and Sabir head out across Europe to ferret out clues from a series of Black Madonna statues located in Europe’s most exotic cities, all while fleeing the deadly advances of Achor Bale.
While the story is more than satisfying for fans of the historical conspiracy game, Reading brings more nuance, substance and action to his well-told tale than one might expect.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-64379-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.
Having survived his tempestuous debut, P.T. Marsh, of Georgia's Mason Falls Police Department, is back for more—including some residue from that first case that just won’t go away.
Dispatched like an errand boy to wealthy real estate mogul Ennis Fultz’s home to find out why he hasn’t joined his bridge buddies, Mayor Stems and interim police chief Jeff Pernacek, for their monthly game, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, find Fultz dead in his bed. It turns out that his passing, devoutly longed for by so many of the people he’d crushed or outwitted on his way to the top, was helped along by the strategic dose of nitrogen somebody substituted for the oxygen he inhaled regularly, especially when he was expecting particular demands on his virility. Marsh and Morgan quickly focus on two candidates who might have made those demands: Suzy Kang, a recent visitor who was so eager to cover any traces that she’d been to Fultz’s house that she sold the car she’d driven there, and Connie Fultz, the victim’s ex-wife and perhaps his current lover, who acidly swats them away and tells them: “Look for some little gal who’s into bondage.” McMahon excels in sweating the procedural details of the investigation, which take the partners from a search for Suzy Kang and that missing car to a not-so-accidental car crash that’s evidently targeted a young girl who has no idea she’s implicated in the case. But he’s set his sights higher, taking in everything from a civil suit the relatives of the perp Marsh shot in The Good Detective (2019) have launched against him to a possible conspiracy behind the deaths of his deeply grieved wife and son, all of it larded with Georgia attitude and truisms, a few of which rise to eloquence (“I wasn’t good at faith. I was good at proof”).
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53556-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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