Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It’s like intentionally selecting a five star restaurant to enjoy great Fettuccine Alfredo and they serve you macaroni and cheese. The authors raised the bar with the quality of the older works in the series. And, they apparently got lazy because, instead of relying upon the excellence of one book to sell the next, they have been resorting to tawdry marketing tactic of a principal character dying, disappearing, etc., only to leave the door open for resurrection ad nauseam. If you believed Pendergast died at the end of “Crimson Shore,” you should be coloring books, not reading them. He isn’t the only one to rise from the dead for this farce as the authors dig up Diogenes to make mischief. Forget, if you will, that the last time we saw him, he was shoved into a volcano. He creates a seduction to marry Constance and fabricates a ludicrous ruse to throw Procter off the trail. Pendergast returns from the dead and, with the help of a compatriot from some black ops group of the past, takes pursuit. That’s the nub of it without spoilers. If you don’t mind them, continue reading. Diogenes stages a false abduction of Constance that has Procter off and running after it, only to be marooned deep in Africa. There, he is stalked by hungry lions so he does the only logical thing. He goes to sleep. In the meantime, Diogenes persuades Constance to accompany him to a private island in the Florida Keys where they can live happily ever after. The fact that she killed him (or, supposedly did) upon their previous encounter does not make him at all suspicious when she readily agrees to go. Part of his plan is to update the Arcanum that has preserved her youth. To do that, he requires fresh human body parts. To acquire there, he’s established an identity as a doctor which works well because, of course, no hospital or similar institution ever verifies credentials. Right. The last we saw Pendergast, he was in a life and death struggle with a superhuman creature that took the combatants into the frigid waters of the Atlantic off New England. Hypothermia would claim a healthy specimen in a matter of minutes, much less an exhausted one. But, not so for him. He bobbed around long enough for a ship full of drug runners to fish him out. They hit upon the brilliant plan of contacting the FBI to demand a ransom. And, of course, the depleted Pendergast dispatched the boatload of armed criminals before that concluded. This reunited him with a compatriot from an old special ops unit with a common goal. Diogenes had killed a member of their clan and it was their sworn oath to avenge him in kind. They track him down, at the expense of the deaths among those in their strike force, and manage to capture him. He is already devastated because Constance had decided to raise his hopes on the island with an ethereal night of sex and then dump him. Like, she couldn’t have done that back at the Pendergast mansion? Diogenes has killed many people, including their fellow agents, so what do they do? Kill him per their oath? Not a chance. Arrest him for his litany of crimes? Child, please. They simply let him go because he’s a “changed man.” Absolutely ludicrous. In the end, Constance decides to go off and live with monks because Pendergast won’t agree to a relationship with her. Gee, do you think she and Diogenes might reappear in a later book? Oh yes, and Procter shows up on the doorstep encrusted in dried blood (from the lion attack) and caked with mud, as a result of his misadventure. You are to believe that, in his two-day (give or take) journey home, he didn’t encounter one water faucet. The bottom line is that, instead of crafting fascinating new characters, the authors simply brought some back from the dead and forced them into an unimaginative plot that was simply a pedestrian extension of the beat-to-death sibling rivalry. It has all the earmarks of something that was done for a paycheck, not the art.