Reader’s Diary

Tom Knox

This starts as an intriguing pseudo-history/archaeology thriller but turns into a vile psycho killer story about three fourths of the way through.   Avoid it.

Jack McDevitt

I love time travel stories, so much so that I’m not very picky about how good they are.  This story of two friends who travel in time, originally to find a missing father but later for entertainment, isn’t in the first rank of time travel stories.  It doesn’t deliver the sense of strangeness at encountering another time that is, for me, an essential element of the genre.  What it does offer is an unusually original plot element: the profligate use of the characters’ machines to avoid or correct the smallest error or inconvenience.  Raining on your arrival in Renaissance Italy?  Come back in a couple of hours.  This leads to all sorts of interesting situations and makes the whole book, despite it’s faults, a lot of fun.

Anne Rice

I picked this up immediately after finishing the previous book and was a little surprised at the narrator’s abrupt leap from child to 30-something man.  It’s a sign of Rice’s talent that the narrator is still recognizably the same.  The same, that is, until He becomes, or realizes, or chooses to realize, that He is the Son of God.  The story of that growth is the story of the book.  It’s presumptuous of any author to answer the question, “what did Christ know about His own nature and when did He know it?”  It’s even more presumptuous to answer that question in the first person.  Rice manages the trick well, and the story builds nicely to a conclusion at John the Baptist’s baptism of Christ and a denouement at the wedding at Cana.

Anne Rice

Writing a fictionalized life of Christ in the first person is a gutsy move.  There must be a million ways to do it wrong, and very few that wouldn’t seem ridiculous or pietistic.  In this book – obviously the product of extensive research and deep reflection – Anne Rice tells a completely believable (if you’re a believer, that is – this book won’t convince any non-believers) story of the child Jesus in His imagined voice.

First of all, it’s a good story, a coming-of-age tale in which “who am I” has cosmic implications.  Secondly, it’s  and extended meditation on the Incarnation.  Thirdly, it’s a lovely portrait of a happy if sometimes contentious extended family.

The very premise of this book sounds ridiculous but I was happily surprised to find that I could hardly put it down.

(The author’s note at the end of the book contains Rice’s story of her return to the Church and an interesting account of her sources and thought processes during the writing of the book.  Her discussion of  the dating of the Gospels is particularity interesting.)

Steve Berry

I thought Steve Berry’s last Cotton Malone novel was a little over the top.  I was happy to find that this, the latest book in the series, isn’t quite as ridiculous; or maybe it is, but I just didn’t notice it because the action is so fast and furious.  Surprisingly, Berry kills a major character, something as rare in series thrillers as characters dying in TV sitcoms.  Oh yeah, the plot has to do with a lost treasure of Napoleon.

Stephen Frey

Michael Rose, the hero of “The Fourth Order”, is the CFO of a company seeking to acquire a large IT firm.  The IT firm is a front organization for a secret government agency and the agency’s directors don’t want it to be acquired.  In the course of the novel Rose finds out who he’s really working for and discovers that most of the things and people in his life – including his wife – are not what or who they seem to be.  The plot of this fast-paced thriller probably wouldn’t stand up to logical analysis and the characters aren’t all that fascinating, but despite its flaws it’s a fun light read.