About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

LIBRRY OF THE DEAD
by Glenn Cooper
Arrow, June 2009
410 pages
6.95 GBP
ISBN: 0099534452


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Someone is terrifying citizens of New York City. People are being sent postcards embellished with crudely drawn pictures of a coffin, together with the day's date, and later that day, the addressee dies. People fear they are being targeted by someone dubbed the Doomsday Killer. Special agent Will Piper is out of favour with the FBI but despite this, he is assigned a new partner, Nancy Lipinski, a young and enthusiastic woman, anxious to help and to make her name. Nancy and Will are anxious to find a link between all the Doomsday Kills but are singularly unable to find any

The action jumps back in time to just after WWII. Winston Churchill is called out of semi-retirement and summons an academic to help both himself and England with knowledge about an excavation on the Isle of Wight. At issue is a secret, closely guarded for centuries, buried in an underground library beneath the ruins of an abbey, but now revealed with dreadful consequences.

The time frame of the novel takes a deep dive back in time to Britain in AD 777. Vectis Abbey is a dual abbey, a common foundation in the period, and comprises both men and women. The local people are deeply superstitious, fearing the possibility of a seventh son of a seventh son. As it happens, a woman of the town conceives twins and the baby who was fertilised first is born second and is thus the seventh son, but the parents are not aware of this. The child they regard as the eighth is possessed of strange powers, being able to write without instruction. He writes lists of names, saying that some people live and others are to die on the date he inscribes. His prognostications are always correct. And it is his predictions that form the hidden secret.

The characterisation of the piece is rather good, especially for a book of this sort. I was moved by the people in both the present and every part of the past. Of course, when one regards their individual situations, each suffers his or her own problems.

And yes, the mystery of the Doomsday Killer is eventually solved. I can't say the solution was one which I thought terribly satisfactory but that's just me. Apart from that, I thought the mystery was rather a good one. Cooper manages what might seem impossible, especially in a first novel, of moving the action between past and present, ancient Britain and modern Las Vegas and the streets of New York with considerable aplomb.

Apparently Cooper has more books in the series forthcoming. I'll be interested to read the next offering if he overcomes the various hiccoughs he encountered in this debut.

Reviewed by Denise Pickles, July 2009

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]