Valley of Bones

Rating:
Summary: MAKES YOU SHIVER, MAKES YOU THINK
Review:
Michael Gruber takes the title of his second novel from the Book of Ezekiel, the verse that refers to the hand of the Lord setting one down "in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones." Not a very pleasant prospect.

In this fast paced story readers will find themselves wondering precisely what it is the Lord or demonic forces can do as they are introduced to a fictional order of nuns that increased its ranks from among orphaned and disabled young girls, and meet Emmylou Dideroff, a devout Catholic woman who claims to have communion with saints - and the devil.

While Valley Of Bones is described as a thriller, it's an enormous mistake to simply pigeon hole this exhilarating page-turner. Gruber pens, if you will, a thinking man's thriller - it delves more deeply than most and his characters are both original and unique. (Not too many thriller writers create characters who quote Thomas Merton). His plots are multi-layered. His narratives send chills down your spine while they just as easily challenge you to think.

Set in Miami, Valley of Bones opens with a young policeman, Tito Morales, witnessing a fall from a hotel balcony. A fall that results in the impalement of a wealthy oilman. Morales had come to the hotel in response to a minor disturbance call, but has witnessed a death and heard a thud that he'll "remember to his grave."

Soon on the scene is homicide detective Jimmy Paz (met in "Tropic of Night"). Paz has a reputation as a crime solver, but neither of the two were prepared for what they found in the man's hotel room - Emmylou Dideroff in a trance-like state. She doesn't take long to relate her reasons for killing the oilman and asks for several notebooks so that she can explain her action and write her confession. Is she a woman truly possessed or is she pretending to be such in order to be declared unfit for trial?

Whatever the answer to that question is, psychologist Dr. Lorna Wise testifies that Dideroff is indeed mentally unable to stand trial. Wise pores over the notebooks the woman has filled in an attempt to understand what could have driven her to such an extreme. But the writings make little sense outside of references to childhood abuse, and previous crimes.

Meanwhile, Paz has a few demons of his own in the form of nightmares, frightening dreams he cannot fully comprehend. He seeks the help of his mother, a santera, to banish the dream. Wise soon finds herself caught in a web, a bicultural web woven by mysticism and Santeria. And, like all webs it's extremely dangerous.

Gruber doesn't short shift readers on romance - there's a torrid one between Wise and Paz. As a matter of fact, this author doesn't short shift readers in any area. After spending years as a speechwriter and ghostwriter for popular legal thrillers, Gruber finally wrote under his own name. He was worth waiting for.

- Gail Cooke

Rating:
Summary: A page-turner brought to you by a compelling writer
Review: As VALLEY OF BONES opens, a body drops out of the sky right before Miami patrolman Tito Morales's eyes. A quick glance up, and the hotel room it fell from is obvious. Morales calls it in, but it takes precious little police work to snatch up the apparent killer. She's sitting in the victim's room, her prints on the murder weapon. How much easier could it get?

Detective Jimmy Paz catches the case. Thinking it might be a slam-dunk, he interviews suspect Emmylou Dideroff, hoping to close the file in record time. But something tells him that it's going to get complicated. It does. Emmylou offers to write her "confessions" if he will supply her with four lined notebooks. What she puts down is her life story, from her beginnings as an abused child, to her survival on the mean streets, to her fortuitous meeting of the Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. Her writing gives the authorities great insight and more information than they really need. But it seems that the cops aren't the only ones interested in the notebooks.

Dr. Lorna Wise, a psychologist studying Emmylou's case, declares her incapable of aiding in her own defense. Reading her patient's daily installments, Dr. Wise finds little reason that someone would ransack her house to get their hands on them, so it shocks her when a man forcefully wrests one of the notebooks from her. She hooks up with Detective Paz to work through the mystery. But there may be more to their relationship than mere business.

Paz, a reputed ladies' man, prides himself on knowing a little bit about a lot of things, having attended the "University of Girl." Is the student now about to graduate? On the heels of one rejection, he rebounds into Lorna's arms. Fortunately, they work well together --- on more than one level.

Unraveling the clues to find the solution takes a bit of concentration and a willingness to open your mind to some otherworldly ideas. Emmylou seems to have an angel guiding her at times; at others, she seems influenced by the devil. Jimmy and Lorna try a Cuban mystical ritual one night, not really believing it will help, but what harm could it do? And all three of them apparently see visions not of this Earth.

A compelling writer, Michael Gruber has tackled a tough current issue, for it appears that oil lust is at the heart of the murder. He takes a hard look at what people do in the competition for oil. Whether you believe it's at the core of some of today's world problems or not, he lays out a convincing case.

While I enjoyed the book, I felt it was a bit overlong. Emmylou's "confessions" rambled at times and the switchbacks between her life story and the investigation could be somewhat off-putting. That small complaint aside, VALLEY OF BONES is a page-turner.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Rating:
Summary: "I like crazy people. They do less harm than the sane."
Review: Deftly juggling four separate plot lines, Michael Gruber's challenging mystery focuses on Emmy Lou Dideroff, a woman with a checkered past, who has been a postulant in a religious nursing order. Found in the Miami hotel room of a Sudanese oil merchant who has just been pushed out of a tenth floor window, Emily is talking earnestly with St. Catherine of Siena when the police arrive, willing to confess to a murder of which she may be innocent because "it would be an honor to be executed unjustly, like Jesus."

Tito Morales, the first officer on the scene, soon becomes the partner of Iago Xavier (Jimmy) Paz, another Cuban-American police officer and a main character in Gruber's previous novel, Tropic of Night. Their relationship with Major Oliphant, formerly with the FBI, and with other federal agencies, as the investigation unfolds, constitutes another subplot, as roadblocks are constantly erected by both the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Lorna Wise, the psychologist in charge of Emmy Lou's competency hearing, becomes her therapist/advocate, and it is to Lorna that Emmy Lou's "confession" in a series of notebooks is addressed. Though Lorna herself is not religious, she feels an inexplicable connection to Emmy Lou, and the reader soon discovers that Lorna has problems of her own. Throughout the novel, historical information is interjected about the Nursing Sisters of The Blood of Christ, the religious order in which Emmu Lou Dideroff was a postulant, and about its founder, Marie-Ange de Berville.

As the investigation moves from Miami to the Sudan, Gruber provides detailed information about the anthropology of the Dinka tribe in Sudan, the ethnographic conflicts which have threatened them with extinction, their powers of magic and sorcery, and the mystical connections they have with their surroundings, calling into play issues far greater than those of the local murder investigation.

Gruber keeps the reader interested, not only in the story but in the unfolding characterizations and interrelationships of his offbeat characters. By withholding key information about them, the author keeps the interest high, further ratcheting up the suspense through the complexities of the plot, with its increasing mayhem. Not just a shoot-'em-up, this mystery novel raises fascinating questions about psychology, religious mania, and responsibility, and as the threads come together in the conclusion (and somehow they all do), the tight construction and careful plotting pay off with a blockbuster resolution. Mary Whipple


Rating:
Summary: over the top and not entirely convincing
Review: I enjoyed Gruber's TROPIC OF NIGHT, which managed to maintain tension as to whether the murderous events therein were supernatural throughout a good two-thirds of the book - and made the "supernatural" quite logical in its own way. The African religious and Santeria aspects were well-handled, even educational. Plus the book was pretty dang scary. In VALLEY OF BONES, Christian mysticism plays a similar role, but it doesn't work as well. This time around, there's really no ambiguity about the supernatural at work from the get-go - one character, psychologist Lorna Wise expresses pro-forma doubts, but the author is clearly on the side of God versus the Devil here. This comes across in the language, which is somewhat didactic, and the narrative, which is strangely lacking in suspense, mostly because the writing seems to be at somewhat of a remove from the action at crucial moments. I like books with multiple narratives, but though the story does make nominal sense at the end, there's a feeling of one too many ingredients spoiling the recipe.

I did enjoy the adventures of Emmylou Dideroff, whose narrative voice has a liveliness and originality that the other threads lack, even if her African experiences seem on the far side of incredible. This might be in part because in order to fit everything in, her story gets pretty condensed at times, and you just have to take it on faith, as it were, that things happened the way she tells it.

I'd rate this 2 1/2 stars, if half stars existed...

Rating:
Summary: excellent crime thriller
Review: Miami Police Officer Morales was just leaving the Trianon Hotel after responding to a hoax call of a disturbance when he saw the man fall from the tenth floor balcony. Though he wanted to vomit, he first called in a homicide and held back his physical need so as not to compromise the crime scene. Not long afterward renowned Detective Paz arrives to take charge of the investigation.

They head up to room 10D to learn more about the victim Jabir Akran al-Muwalid to decide whether a suicide, an accident or a murder occurred. Inside the room in some form of a trance is Emmylou Dideroff who insists that she was talking with the dead Saint Catherine of Siena before she fainted. She also says that Mr. al-Muwalid is a mass murderer slaughtering thousands from her tribe and others with his death squad in the Sudan; she swears she came to forgive him not kill him though the murder weapon belongs to her.

Above are just the first few pages of an excellent crime thriller that plays out on three interconnected fascinating story lines. The obvious is Jimmy Paz's investigation; then there is the extracts from the book Faithful Unto Death: The Story of the Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ by St. Benedicta Cooley; finally the handwritten bound notes dubbed The Confessions of Emmylou Dideroff that the wild protagonist furbishes to Paz. Fans of deep police procedurals with two intriguing twists (the other sub-stories) starring a wonderful protagonist and a weird but intriguing suspect will take immense delight with Michael Gruber's return of the Paz (see TROPIC OF NIGHT).

Harriet Klausner


Rating:
Summary: A novel of character
Review: Mysteries catch most any reader's fancy, but this book, billed as a thriller, goes way beyond the normal boundaries set by who-dunnits and shoot-em-ups. A major plus is a single character, Emmylou Dideroff. Emmylou's character is one of the most tightly woven, intriguing personalities in contemporary American fiction.

The story begins as police officer Tito Morales witnesses a spectacular murder. Morales has answered what appeared to be a routine call asking for help over a disturbance at a hotel. Huddled in the victim's room is Emmylou, speaking in a low voice that sounds like prayer. Detective Jimmy Paz teams up with Morales and freelance psychologist Lorna Wise to solve an increasingly complex crime. Interspersed with straight narrative told in third person are Emmylou's personal story in first person and also a straightforward history of a fictional Catholic group, The Society of Nursing Sisters. These three different accounts are organized smartly by setting Emmylou's story in italics, the straight narrative in regular typeface, and the history of the Society in boldface. That graphic technique makes for an interesting method for spinning the mystery.

The story line's strongest element is Emmylou. Born to a cold, detached mother and sexually abused by a stepfather, Emmylou has done it all. She has an eidetic memory and although everyone believed her a slow reader when she was small, in truth, she was an avid and advanced reader at an early age. Emmylou loves books like a junkie loves drugs. Turning to prostitution when she flees to Miami, she complains about not being able to get a library card because she has no address. "It's hard to be a street prostitute with advanced literary tastes," she writes.

Author Michael Gruber can be credited for writing a mystery that rises to the level of an epic novel. He manages to inspire the reader to think about the poetry of Jane Hirshfield, and uses lines from her poems to create elements in his tale. He tackles the great issues of philosophy, history, the sciences, and religion. From the intricacies of Santeria, a Cuban and Brazilian variation of voodoo, to the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gruber stirs the gray matter in the reader's brain and runs this novel like a wild carnival ride. Throughout it all, Emmylou's voice is strong, clear, and fascinating. She can be humorous or philosophical. She gives an account of the impact from a bomb dropped on a church in Sudan. "I was blown out of your world, really, now that I think about it, and this makes the next part difficult to tell. Out of prose into poetry. Out of the secular into the mythos. Out of chronos into kairos, God's time."

Adding lightness to the mix, and in the tradition of the truly great mysteries of yore, is a romance that brings two unlikely people together.

A small complaint can be made regarding a fairly simplistic resolution of the plot, but never mind. Above all this is a novel of character, despite the publisher billing it as a straight thriller. And rest assured, Emmylou is a character no reader will forget. For Emmylou alone, and for the interesting fiction of The Society of Nursing Sisters, the book deserves a top rating. Novels like this shore up the quality of American fiction.


Rating:
Summary: New Author, But I've Read a Dozen of His Books
Review: Robert K. Tannenbaum has published some fourteen novels in the series featuring the New York City district attorney Butch Karp. I enjoyed them a great deal. But in truth, these novels were actually written by Michael Gruber who put the characters and the story around the actual incidents from Tannenbaum's actual cases.

Now Mr. Gruber has split off and written a series (now up to two books with a third in the works) featuring a Cuban-American detective based in Miami. Beginning with Tropic of Night, which explored ourperceptions of race, Valley of Bones explores the nature of faith.

Mr. Gruber writes powerful books, filled with interesting characters and plot, but also with an underlying study of part of the human experience.


Rating:
Summary: Fabulous!
Review: This book is even better than his first one, which was great. I could not put it down; it was fascinating. The author portrays such deep and unique viewpoints of potentially controversial subjects, i.e., race and religion.

He is apparently working on a third novel in this series. I can't wait..