Helpful Score: 2
Perhaps my favorite murder mystery of all time, a police-procedural with engaging, fully-realized characters, and a back-story laid out in a second plot line narrated by Jane Doe, who went to Africa to study their cultures and came back an apprentice witch. Gruber manages to suggest a scientific biochemistry/physiology explanation for the witch-work, so that it does not read as fantasy, but even as you emerge blinking from the world of this novel wishing it could go on for a thousand pages more, you are glad it isn't really true. Brilliantly imagined, beautifully written, a superb work of fiction.
Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she's nothing, a shadow living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she's dead. Or so Jane hopes. Then the killings start, a series of rutualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memory has been reased - as if a spell has been cast on them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers; a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa.
Pretty darn good thriller. Not edge of the seat stay up till all hours and finish, but layered and twisted with a dose of confession and redemption. Oh did I mention anthropology and magical religions? Read this and learn. A better read than the The Book of Air and Shadows
