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Nick Herald is a professional genealogist working in New Orleans, who is hired to search for the relatives of an elderly Holocaust survivor. Soon Nick discovers that this man is trying to get revenge on a powerful New Orleans family and he finds himself thrown into a confusing world of death, history and mystery. There is the old saying that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but when I saw the dreadful garish one that Top Publishing had dreamed up, I had to feel inclined against this book. Sadly, however much I wanted to like it, it became a struggle to finish it. In the first place, Fox cannot write decent dialogue. The discussions of the main character with his friends in the English department were full of convoluted, ridiculous language that no self-respecting person would ever say, even if they were a professor in a university such as Oxford or Harvard. Unfortunately, dialogue as bad as this is jarring and it spoils the flow of the story as a whole. Fox clearly has tried to write a reasonable book, but what he has produced is weak in the extreme. The plot itself, whilst having the potential to be interesting, is slow and not overly original. On the more positive side, I know nothing of genealogy, so the book did provide some useful information for me. In addition, I felt that Fox did a reasonable job in creating a sense of place, both of New Orleans and of Louisiana as a whole. However, this cannot mask the fact that there should have been a lot more work done on 'Deadly Pedigree' before it was allowed to see the light of the day. It really does not have that many redeeming qualities, so this is probably one only for masochists.
Reviewed by Luke Croll, June 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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