About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

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


  

CEMETERY DANCE
by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Grand Central Publishing, May 2009
421 pages
$26.99
ISBN: 0446580295


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I am a sucker for a tantalizing suspense story especially if there is a touch of the macabre about it. If it is well written and fast-moving, I can willingly suspend my disbelief and believe six impossible things before breakfast. And I am even more delighted when a plausible explanation is available as well as a supernatural one.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child write such stories. They have written both stand-alones and a series featuring FBI Agent A.X.L. Pendergast, a rather shadowy but highly competent man who seems to always appear when the bizarre and unearthly are manifest.

This story opens with William Smithback Jr., reporter for the New York Times. As he is waiting for his wife in their apartment, a strange, shambling gray-faced figure bursts through his door and stabs him with a knife. He dies horribly. Later the doorman and other witnesses insist that the figure was Colin Fearing, an out-of-work actor who also lived in the building. The only problem with that is that Fearing's dead body had been found ten days before. When Lieutenant D'Agosto and Agent Pendergast go to look for his body, the container is empty except for a tiny papier-mache coffin. Maybe the killer was the undead. Pendergast, who was born in New Orleans, suggest Obeah.

With these things in mind the two policemen and Smithback's wife, Nora Kelly, investigate the murder and some subsequent ones. They learn of an isolated group of 144 men who belong to a sect that sacrifices animals as part of its rituals. Smithback had been planning to write a story revealing this, and then he was murdered. The sect is housed in a primeval forest on the northern tip of Manhattan Island. The Ville is a maze of buildings, an old church, and unlit subterranean corridors where anyone might get lost.

The suspense is high. The setting is fascinating. There is, indeed, a primeval forest on the northern end of Manhattan, Inwood Hill Park, comprising 196 acres. The park was home to country retreats of wealthy men in the 19th century including Isidor Straus (Macy's). As far as I know there is no community called the Ville or a sect located there, but there might be. One never knows.

The characters, as is true in most thrillers, are rather two-dimensional. They are really action figures or superheroes who will brave all dangers, persevere in all difficulties, and, the reader knows, rescue the fair maiden at the end of the story. We expect this, but I find it great fun to experience the suspense, wonder how he is going to succeed this time, and conjecture that maybe this is the one adventure when he will not get there in time.

A map of Manhattan Island would have made the book more easily understood although the internet supplied me with what I needed. And I always appreciate authors who, in an afterword, explain what is real in their story and what is the creation of their fertile minds. I wish these two had done so.

And a warning - animals are killed and not offstage, so the squeamish may want to give this book a miss.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, April 2009

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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