| View Larger Image | Valley of Bones: 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: | 448 Pages | | Publication Date: | May 01, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 302,297nd |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780061650741
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Michael Gruber's second novel to feature police detective Jimmy Paz is a chilling and remarkable work of intelligence and imagination. After a wealthy oilman plunges ten stories to his death from the balcony of a Miami hotel, Paz and the young cop who witnessed the fall discover a woman on her knees praying in the dead man's room. A motive and strong evidence point to the woman—Emmylou Dideroff—as the murderer, but she insists that she's innocent of the crime, while freely admitting her guilt in numerous other criminal acts and abominations. As her shocking confessions blur the lines between charity and vengeance, delusion and reality, Paz finds himself drawn once again into the unexplained . . . and into a collision with an evil of inconceivable power. |
Amazon.com Review
This top-notch novel confirms Gruber's place as a gifted writer who stretches the conventional bounds of the genre by placing the mysteries of faith and religious experience and the complexities of the human mind as well as spirit at the center of his work. It's a taut, compelling whodunit that's as far from a typical detective procedural as good is from evil and a worthy follow-up to his acclaimed debut (Tropic of Night) that also features Cuban-American cop Jimmy Paz. Here Gruber tells a mesmerizing tale of Emmylou Dideroff, who communes with saints and whose checkered past includes stints as a hooker, drug dealer, and the leader of a band of Sudanese freedom fighters. But did she kill the Arab businessman on a government "watch list" who plunged to his death from a Miami hotel? While that's the incident that brings her to Paz's attention, it's only one of his questions about this strange woman, whose unsettling "confessions" stir up the detective's confusion about his own deepest beliefs. Emmylou is as fascinating and fully realized as Jane Doe, the memorable protagonist of Gruber's first book--so too is Lorna Wise, the psychologist brought in to assess Emmylou's sanity, whose personal and professional lives are turned totally upside down by her involvement in the case and her relationship with Paz. This is a smart, riveting, wholly original and thoroughly fascinating book that's impossible to put down and leaves the reader with only one question--when is this author's next one coming out? --Jane Adams |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 31 reviews)
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Great seller, would buy from again. by Linda Hammer (NH)  5 Stars
April 08, 2009
This is one of the best books I have ever read. Michael Gruber always delivers!
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Same rating as "Tropic of Night" by WB, Zeno  3 Stars
February 16, 2009
but a definitely superior product.
[For me, five stars is a rarely attainable maximum, the one that only the "hundred you'd take to the desert island where you're marooned" get, so I'm somewhat restricted in my four-stars awards. If Amazon's rating system allowed it, I'd give "Valley of Bones" ("VoB") 3¾+ stars].
The plot is aptly summarized both in Amazon's ed rev, and in Gail Cooke's and Kay Day's excellent and more detailed ones (with which I agree), so I won't repeat it here.
Obviously, Gruber has taken the trouble to read widely on the subject. He's also able to invent a very ingenious and very complicated, many-layered story (you'll savour it more if you read it twice, as on a first perusal it seems less plausible than when you know the ending, and the second time, page-turning urgency gone, you pay more attention to the details), full of twists wound around a theme told at two different levels, let's call them naturalistic and numinous to simplify. His most risky character, the nun, is well portrayed (I actually have a couple of female Catholic friends that, while quite lower on the "fundamentalist sanctity" scale, could conceivably hold the same beliefs and attitudes). The epiphany is very convincing and masterfully depicted: when she shouts "filthy filthy ... !", for example, you feel it could have been taken from a real experience, and is actually quite a respectable attempt to reconstruct and repeat -with a difference- a historical episode (I'm sorry to be so vague, but otherwise I'd be giving away too many details of a scene that merits to be read by "virgin" minds). This numinous level version is also more believable than that of ToN, perhaps because its main episodes are placed before the end, and so the denouement is much more rational and "whodunitic".
The other two main characters are also tolerably well depicted, although less so than the nun's (Paz and his mother are, as in ToN, two clichéed Cubans, while Dr. Wise is, at least at the beginning, a bit of a Woody-Allenish caricature, not really suited to the mood of the book). Miami and Florida are described rather well, the city's and its police's corrupted atmosphere coming through more believably, and in a less annoying language, than, say, in Stone's "King of Swords". The African part is superb, sounding both matter-of-fact and exotic. I'm not qualified to judge whether the account of Garigeau's/Dideroff's infancy in Florida and teenhood in Blue Ridge with the white supremacist philosopher and drug dealer Orne (IMO one of the least plausible of the book's characters) is believable. For me, it was the least interesting part of the novel, and the most contrived (I mean, really, could there be people so crime-prone that don't get caught?). The writing is vivid, and there are four distinct narrations in different styles: I would say a virtuoso performance (I assume the first parts of the Order's history are written to parodize some Saints' bios).
All in all, I would say that IMO, for somewhat intellectual tastes, this should the best thriller (if it can at all be confined to that genre, although I think it trascends it) around. Why then not four stars? For two main reasons:
(1) The book is essentially the same as ToN (although of course with different personages except the here almost monogamous Paz, and Barlow, and their families; different type of numen involved -although there's some Santería as well, but it's secondary-; different African setting; much more "international" and ramified plot; slightly different and more believable story development, as already noted above); in particular, the modes of description of the epiphanies, although with different meanings and actors, are almost identical.
(2) The resolution is implausible. CAUTION: PERHAPS LIGHT SPOILER AHEAD! For example, how did the perps know Emily would fall into a trance and so be conveniently around when Paz entered the suite? More basic, how did they know Morales and Paz would be the cops who first arrived? Different ones might have acted differently.
LIGHT SPOILER ENDED.
Or, is it believable that a Government psychiatrist could spirit away a patient interned by a judge in a Gov hospital, without neither consequences nor investigation into the disappearance?
There are other examples of not very credible situations in the novel (a one-legged, or at least with only one foot, person parachuting? Etc.).
(3) Also, although this is a minor quibble, the book must have been finished in a rush: there are some verb tense confusions (especially in Lorna's part, which is told in the present tense), and some negatives are missing from Emmylou's (or else some sentences would have no meaning).
To conclude: VoB is a four-star book if you aren't acquainted with Gruber's ToN, a three-star one atherwise. Eminently worth reading in any case. I won't however buy the third Paz volume.
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I expected more. by William Brownville (Fairhaven, MA USA) 3 Stars
December 27, 2008
I read this immediately after the unforgettable Tropic of Night, and was really bored. Gruber is a great writer, but seems to have left the plot out this time. There were some good scenes, but Gruber's formula of having three alternating points of view: a diary, a protaganist, and another protaganist, seemed forced this time around.
The detective story was contrived and convoluted, and instead of it coming to a climax or being solved, it was all just explained by a minor character (at gunpoint) over four pages of dialogue. Yawn. Maybe it was too subtle for me (Tropic of Night, with it's baby brain-ectomies, was definitely not subtle), or maybe I'm just bored by books that hint at the miracles of Christianity when there's thousands of other interesting religions.
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Way above average crime fiction by bhr (Bryn Mawr, PA USA) 5 Stars
August 12, 2008
It's summer: I'm reading a lot of crime fiction. I've picked up some Patterson (how can you avoid it) some Baldacci, and some others.
I picked up this one (book on CD actually) because the premise intrigued me.
Crime fiction without a serial killer! Does anyone do these anymore? Well, Gruber does, and this is a great one.
Apparently, the hero of the book, I.X. "Jimmy" Paz, is the star of a trilogy. But though this is one of a series, you almost never realize that. His character is drawn well enough without it. He is flawed, but not in a tragic way. He is strong, but need not apply to the Justice League. He seems very credible and empathetic.
As does Lorna, the heroine. She goes through some terrific growth through this story, and the author does a fantastic job of getting in her head-shrinking head to show where her challenges and strengths are.
There is a third main character, but unlike most crime fiction, this character may not be the killer. You suspect in the beginning that, though the evidence points to her being the killer, she may be innocent. Her "confessions" make up a third of the book, and she's absolutely terrifying and terrific. In a very different way than the average crime-fiction's sociopath, I must say.
The religion in the book is entirely believable; the only small problem I had with the whole thing is the snipes at modern society (hey it ain't great but it's all we got).
All in all, I don't want to say more so as not to give anything away, but I would totally put this on your vacation reading list. It was a great ride.
(*)>
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Audio abridged 5cd by Barbara Lane (Sydney Australia)  4 Stars
August 07, 2008
Emmylou dideroff a woman who believes both God and the devil live inside her. She had a detached mother and was sexually abused by the stepfather which eventually pushed to prostitution.
We meet Emmylou sitting in a hotel room occupied up to a short time ago by a mysterious African who currently resides on top of a spiked fence some ten floors below.
Jimmy Paz an Miami Detective arrested Emmylou as the prime suspect but she leads all to wonder if she is insane.
Mystery and suspense told well. The plot never slips.
This is one of Michael Gruber best novels.(Can't fall alseep through this Audio trust me).
Barbara Audio only
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