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When FBI agent Sean Reilly, who lives just north of New York City, gets a frantic call from his ex-girlfriend Michelle in California that someone is trying to kill her, he immediately flies cross country to help. Upon arrival, he learns that her four-year-old son Alex is actually his son as well. Before too much time has elapsed, Michelle is murdered and Reilly is the child's sole parent. Reilly calls his new love, Tess Chaykin, an archaeologist with whom he has shared other dire adventures in previous books, to come and help him care for Alex. Meanwhile, scientists in LA are being kidnapped and no one knows why. A biker gang is implicated in the crimes, and Michelle's killers are linked to the kidnappings. As Reilly begins to pursue them, most of the gang members meet sudden and brutal deaths at the hands of a criminal mastermind known as El Brujo, or the Sorcerer. His real name is Raoul Navarro, and the FBI thought he had died five years ago in Central America, murdered after an attack on his compound led by Reilly and an operative named Munro. Navarro is back, however, transformed physically by plastic surgery but as insanely sadistic as ever, paralyzing people with a potent poison made from spiders and lizards before maiming and killing them grotesquely with his small sharp knife. Why is he back and what does he want? Part of the answer relates to the book's first chapter, which takes place in the 1700s. A Jesuit missionary in the Central American rainforest became enamored of a potent drug that the natives used, some sort of powerful hallucinogen from a local flower. He and his drug disappear, but a book he wrote about it finds its way centuries later to Navarro, who is now apparently seeking to recreate the drug. Navarro believes that this formula will give him a powerful, addictive pill, more detrimental to people and more lucrative for him than anything that has ever existed before. The idea of reincarnation enters the story in two ways here. The drug seems to put users back into their previous lives, often causing irreparable psychic trauma, and a possible reincarnated scientist may be the person El Brujo searches for. Navarro also has a whole kit of other weird drugs that paralyze, cause psychosis, and destroy people's brains. Some of these are administrated through darts, and others are contained in a gray powder that Navarro rubs into his victims' open wounds. When someone is shot with a dart, he is paralyzed and then Navarro can do what he likes with the person, usually ending in horrific death. So when Reilly and Tess, after many chases and close calls, are wakened in the middle of the night by Navarro and his henchmen and shot with darts, it is clear what will happen. Yet could they really end up this way? We learn, also, that Alex has a more important role to play in all of this as well. Author Raymond Khoury employs a double point of view in his novel's structure. The chapters in which Reilly appears are written in the first person from Reilly's point of view. This gives us immediate access to the action and his reactions. All the other chapters are written with a third-person omniscient narrator, giving us an overview of action and some limited insight into the character's inner workings. This technique can be a bit jarring, especially each time we re-encounter Reilly's own voice. Through both points of view, however, Khoury is able to create a suspenseful thriller. Although the outcome is really not seriously in doubt, since Reilly seems to be the sort of hero who will win out in the end, the twists and turns of the plot kept me reading at a frantic pace and often took my breath away. Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.
Reviewed by Anne Corey, January 2012
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