| View Larger Image | Tropic of Night: A Novel | Paperbackby Michael Gruber (Author)
| List Price: | $14.99 | | Price: | $10.19 | | You Save: | $4.80 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Harper Paperbacks | | Edition: | Reprintth Edition | | Page Count: | 496 Pages | | Publication Date: | January 01, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 50,191th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780061650734
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Jane Doe lives in the shadows under an assumed name. A once-promising anthropologist and an expert on shamanism, everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes. Jimmy Paz is a Cuban-American police detective. Straddling two cultures, he understands things others cannot. When the killings start -- a series of ritualistic murders -- all of Miami is terrified. Especially Jane. She knows the dark truth that Jimmy must desperately search to uncover. As their lives slowly interconnect, Jane and Paz are soon caught in a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil as unimaginable as it is terrifying . . . |
Amazon.com Review
This debut thriller should come with a warning--do not pick up if you have anything else planned for as long as it takes to read it! Tropic of Night is a dramatic, stylish, smart, and very strongly plotted novel, mixing anthropology, ethnography, sorcery, mayhem, and murder in an intriguing and wholly captivating story that ranges from Mali to Siberia, Nigeria to Miami, and never lets up. Jane Doe is a smart but listless graduate student when she encounters Marcel Vierchau, a French scholar whose lover she quickly becomes, following him to the strange world of the Chenka, a mysterious sect of Siberian shamans in whose society she quickly loses her scholarly objectivity--and nearly her life. Returning without Vierchau to the comfortable world of her wealthy family, she meets and marries DeWitt Moore, a black poet who accompanies her to Africa on a field trip that turns him into a powerful shaman, awakens her own abilities to commune with the spirits of the Yoruba sorcerers, and again comes close to destroying her. Wary of Moore's new strength, she stages her own death and becomes a faceless member of Miami's underclass, but just when she believes she's safe from his reach, a series of bloody ritual murders of pregnant Miami women convince her that she is once again his target--and that anyone who comes between them, including her adopted daughter, will also meet a terrifying end. Michael Gruber delivers a fabulous, wholly original read that will linger in the reader's mind long after the last page is turned! --Jane Adams |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 72 reviews)
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spirit world comes alive in Miami by John Augsbury (Cayman Islands)  4 Stars
June 20, 2009
This is an engaging read of material that I usually do not peruse. Spirit world and Africian spirituality meeting American 21st century with an interesting twist.
The witch who is killing to increase his power is the current plot but the background and Africian spiritual development is also told here using journal entries.
My major complaint is when a book creates throughout an almost perfect creation of evil power only to be overcome or defeated in the last 25 pages. "The Eye of the Needle" is an example of what I mean.
Characters draw us in and are likeable as is the yarn, It turns conventional spirituality on its head.
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Tropic of Night by Blue Stocking Girl (Santa Monica, California United States)  5 Stars
March 15, 2009
Very complex story. This book requires close attention to detail. Mr. Gruber sure knows how to spin a tale.
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If only the last part (roughly, the mostly Miami events) had kept pace with the first ... by WB, Zeno  3 Stars
January 11, 2009
then we would have been rewarded with an extraordinary achievement.
(In what follows, I assume everybody planning to buy this novel has read the Amazon's editorial reviews, which summarize the book's contents well enough so I don't have to retell them).
Unfortunately the book has two major flaws:
(1) It starts at an irresistible and utterly enthralling pace (the Siberian interlude, and, more in general, anything related to Vierchau is extremely well done), which is maintained in Africa, until Jane departs from the Olo's village. Then the tempo slackens, and frankly, becomes in places almost a boring formulaic police procedural. Perhaps in a story of this type this is unavoidable (I mean, after conjecture and speculation, you have to come back to everyday "reality" as we know it, and it disappoints).
(2) It goes too far in the powers it attributes to DeWitt, and perhaps also Jane. Their "physical" explanation isn't convincing enough, and neither is the time it took both to master them (it isn't clearly stated in Jane's diary, but it can't have been more than a month and a half, maximum). Even if Jane writes that she's performing "by rote", it isn't believable (and even less so in DeWitt's case) that what requires a life's training can be acquired, almost casually, in less that two months.
(3) There are also some minor inconsistencies, as for example Jane's assertion that, had DeWitt completed his okunikua ritual, he "might have been able to whip Ifa". C'mon, lady: if what you wrote in your diary is true, DeWitt whipping Ifa would be an impossibility, like, say, Jimmy Paz whipping the Christian God!
But perhaps all books of this type face a fork: there arrives a point after which they have to choose either to go magical or supernatural all the way (in which case we have, God help us, the likes of Aleister Crowley or the countless worthless sorcery or "occult" books that flood the market), or they must attempt at the end to provide a semirational explanation, and the transition, as I wrote above, can't be managed without a letdown.
This could be avoided by following a more "moderate" storyline, as for example in Nick Stone's "Mr. Clarinet", but then I would regret that there's not enough vodoo, sorcery, or whatever you call it. Perhaps it's a no-win situation, and Gruber is to be commended for having given it a very respectable try.
My advice: buy it and read it to the -open- end (does this mean there'll be a sequel?). It's an important effort in its genre.
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Silence of the Lambs meets Serpent and the Rainbow. And better than either. by William Brownville (Fairhaven, MA USA) 5 Stars
December 27, 2008
Another Gruber book that I just couldn't stop reading. Tropic of Night is an original, expectation-defying thriller tinged with dark - yet scientific - mysticism. Think Serpent and the Rainbow meets Silence of the Lambs. Having just read Gruber's recent "Book of Air and Shadows", I was expecting this book to be less mature - but I was completely mistaken. He juggles multiple stories, points of view, and tenses with ease. The story, the characters, and the writing are all first-rate and hard to forget, and there several bone-chilling scenes. (I felt that I needed a glossary to keep track of some of the African terms, and realized there was one - as I turned the last page of the book. It's at the end.)
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INTRODUCTION TO AFROCUBAN DEITIES by David Dubin (LOOMIS, CA) 5 Stars
March 28, 2008
THIS IS A WONDERFUL NOVEL FROM SEVERAL STANDPOINTS. IT IS PAINSTAKINGLY RESEARCHED, LITERATE WITHOUT BEING PRETENTIOUS, INTERWEAVES SEVERAL SUBPLOTS SEAMLESSLY INTO THE TEXT AND FOR THOSE OF US WHO ARE INTERESTED, OPENS A HITHERTO CLOSED WINDOW ON A BELIEF SYSTEM THAT AT LEAST 5 MILLIONS AMERICANS SHARE'
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