Customer Reviews

Valley of Bones

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I don't know how the elves in Amazon work, but a while back this book popped up on the screen as a "recommended" book for me. Those elves know what they're doing.

I started with Gruber's first book (aside from the 16 Tannenbaum novels he ghost-wrote) Tropic of Night. Loved it. Turned around and bought this one the next day. Loved it,too.

Gruber does several things that make his books great fun to read. First, he writes a good story. Second, he includes an interesting backstory, with lots of things to learn about. Finally, he provides us with some characters to care about. And all the way through, he tosses off bits of intriguing information and poetry and literature. All of these things he wraps in a believable magical realism that makes you think, "what if?"

Recommended.

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

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.

Michael Gruber explores people of faith in this superb thriller. There's Emmylou Dideroff, a woman with a tragic, heroic and altogether remarkable past. A woman who believes both God and the devil live inside her. She is introduced to us sitting in the hotel room occupied up to a short time ago by a mysterious African who currently resides atop a spiked fence some ten floors below.

Jimmy Paz, an Afro-Cuban Miami detective arrests Emmylou as the prime suspect in what may be a murder. But Emmylout provides a confusing story that leads all to wonder if she is insane. Thus, Lorna Wise, a psychologist, is introduced as one of three mental health professionals assigned the task of determining is Emmylou is sane enough to stand trial.

Emmylou is somehow associated with the Blood of Christ Society of Nursing Sisters which leads us into the history of the order and its work in the war zones of the world.

Jimmy Paz is disturbed by Emmylou, sensing a dark evil lurking within her. Just so happens that Jimmy Paz is also troubled by his involvement in a recent murder case involving voodoo. Jimmy's mom knows that Jimmy is trouble: she happens to be a voodoo priestess.

Lorna Wise wants to penetrate Emmylou's mind and she too feels the evil. Lorna has a few problems of her own. Hypochondria for one.

Add in a few possible gangsters, arms merchants, secret agents and you have the makings of a great story and author Michael Gruber puts it all together superbly well.

This is mystery and suspense told well. The plot never slips. The characters are absorbing and real. There's simply not a false note in the book. Gruber is a superb writer, an exceptionally talented storyteller.

Gruber doesn't telegraph: you don't know what the climax will be. He introduces characters as they are needed, including some real dillies, like the backwoods sophisticate who runs a wide ranging drug selling operation while awaiting the end of the world --- or his motorcycle riding buddy who can get you anything that goes bang or boom. Gruber takes us to Africa and the horror of its civil wars. The fight for oil and the fight to remain alive play a major role.

There are surprises along the way, each of them carefully crafted so we don't lose our belief in Gruber's characters.

Gruber leads us to multiple climaxes as he resolves the several mysteries of the novel. This is one of the best novels I've read this year. Gruber is a master of the craft.

Jerry

I decided to read Valley of the Bones because of a favorable review in Crisis Magazine. It analyzed the Seattle author's treatment of the Catholic Faith:

"Michael Gruber could not be more respectful and serious about the Catholic Faith in this novel. Creating a female protagonist as a virtual St. Joan among the Dinka people of the Sudan is a very bold and brave act that he just manages to bring off. A sense of genuine faith shines through, as unorthodox though the setting may be. In his own way, Gruber shows us the makings of a saint in an all-too-horrible, secular world. This author is clearly someone to watch."

The review piqued my interest, and I read the novel. It was a real page-turner. I recommend it with the following caution: Valley of Bones depicts some extreme forms of human evil, such as child abuse and torture. It takes a strong stomach to read certain sections of the novel, but that is part of the world we live in. On the positive side, Michael Gruber not only writes accurately about Catholic practices, but he gets inside the Catholic faith in a way I have seen in very few novels.

Like Gruber's earlier novel this one is labeled a thriller, but also like his earlier one, there's a whole lot more going on here. Unless, of course, you're not one of those who consider the virtue of monogamous love, redemption through religious conversion, or the little concept of the ongoing war between good and evil on earth to be worthy thematic material.

This one starts off in the usual way. A spectacular murder occurs--the old fellow-thrown-out-of-sixth-story-window-impaled-on-wrought-iron-fence kind of thing--and is witnessed by no less than one of Miami's finest. The detective shows up--Jimmy Paz of Tropic of Night fame--they walk up to the sixth floor apartment and what do you know, there's an odd-looking woman up there in a trance-like state babbling religious nonsense. Her fingerprints happen to be on the weapon that clonked the victim on the head before he was defenestrated.

But you know it's not going to be that easy. She doesn't remember doing it, she says, even though she knows the victim is an evil man and deserved it. And, oh yeah, she was just having a conversation with St. Catherine--the, err, dead Catholic saint--something she does often. That's why she doesn't remember anything.

The cop figures she's a whack job, and the shrink assigned to her thinks she's a whack job, so the judge orders her held over at the local nuthouse for thirty days for observation. She says she's going to write a confession--Paz suggest she might be able to avoid the death penalty by doing so--but instead she pretty much tells the story of her life. And that's what we get. Her story and the more conventional cop and bad guy story make up the novel in alternating chapters, and to say it is compelling would be a gross understatement.

To begin with, the suspect, Emmylou Dideroff, has quite a story to tell. As a child, her mother was schizophrenic and unresponsive, and her sheriff stepfather routinely molested her. From this promising beginning it is a sharp descent into murder, promiscuity, drug-abuse, prostitution and practically every other kind of evil you can think of. She candidly admits she was in thrall to Satan, to whom she refers as the, "shining man."

After getting shot in the back during a DEA raid at her boyfriend's marijuana factory, she manages to escape and finds her way to a convent, a sanctuary of fictional Catholic nuns, whose sect is that which preaches activism and involvement rather than pacifism and passivism. Reluctant and bitter at first, she finally succumbs to their unwavering persistence and eventually converts to Catholicism in one of the more moving scenes in recent literature. It is finely, finely done, and shows a true understanding of conventional Catholicism, both in its concept, and in the often gently sardonic way in which its practitioners adhere to it.

But that's not all. Her new found ardor takes her and a group of these nuns to the Sudan in Africa where they try to protect and then defend a group of downtrodden, helpless Christians caught in the middle of the political chaos existent between the corrupt, oil-hungry government and various militant Islamic groups. Somewhere in there she discovers that she can converse with St. Catherine, and in fact has been able to do so all along, missing the signals previously. Better not say too much more here, but her intense spirituality bring the events that occur here to a level that is almost surreal. Or miraculous, if you prefer.

In the meantime Jimmy Paz, the detective hero of Gruber's first novel, begins to come across some very perplexing aspects to Emmylou's murder investigation, not the least of which is that various thugs keep trying to steal her journal. Again, this aspect is a little bit more of a conventional police-procedural, but it is nevertheless intriguing and generally stays within the realm of credibility, unlike the delusional, paranoid, fantastical nature of so many others of this type. Along the way Paz meets and falls in love with the blond psychologist, and begins to recognize the benefits of monogamy, something he had erstwhile avoided, both here and in the earlier work. A nice touch this, fitting in perfectly with the character of the debonair Paz as he begins to age.

All in all, a terrific read. It's not quite as bone-chilling or eerie as the Tropic of Night, but it is easily as entertaining and probably a little more cerebral. Quite a concept this, the thinking-man's thriller. May there be many more.

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

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.

A complex and intriguing story, written with such intimacy I felt that I knew the heroine personally. Outstanding!

Some readers have criticized Valley of Bones as being too convoluted, too vague, but I just don't see it. I do see it as complicated. It's not Spenser and it's not Elvis Cole. It's more like James Lee Burke and John LeCarre. It's an excellent novel but like those one in a thousand novels, it asks the reader to work as hard as the writer. The benefits of the story won't come to you unless you're willing to role up your sleeves. Like LeCarre, Michael Gruber makes the reader commit to effort.

Jimmy Paz is a pretty boy. He gets to wear $1000 dollar suits because he is just that. He's well cut and he wants his suits to be well cut. He demands that of his new partner, Tito Morales, a rookie cop called to a Miami Hotel over a disturbance. The disturbance? 'One of the guests tried to fly,' he tells Paz when Jimmy rolls in . . . 'from the tenth floor.' Paz is promiscuous. He's a gigolo without the capital "G." Oh yeah, and he has a violent, violent temper. Oh yeah. One other thing. He cuffs himself to his bed because he walks in his sleep.

Lorna Wise is a psychologist, a state employee by choice, a PhD who doesn't want the exposure of private practice. As full of himself as Paz is she's an empty sack, sleeping with married men and collegues, ashamed of her body (which ain't bad, we are told) and ashamed of herself, outside and in. She's a mess. Oh yeah. She thinks she's doomed to die. Soon. She makes 'acute hypochondria' sound as simple as an ad for Johnson & Johnson bandaids.

These are interesting people but they're Booster Club Moms and Dads compared to Emmylou Dideroff, drug dealer, revolutionary, hooker, nun, ecstatic, and frequent conversationalist with saints. Deceased saints.

Here's just a note from the mouth of Emmylou: "What passes as goodness between us fallen human beings is generally not more than a mutual picking of lice from our fur, and a suspension of our desire to eat eachother up. It is only social goodness."

How do you get to meet these three people? Well, Mike Gruber weaves a troika of stories. First there's the History of The Sisters of The Blood of Christ. Then there's the confessions of Emmylou Dideroff, as she writes them over the course of four notebooks imprisoned in a state mental hospital for the murder of the flyer. Seems evidence points to his takeoff as being non volitional. Oh. Would you like to guess who is her therapist? And then of course is the murder mystery itself which by now has graduated to a multiple murder mystery.

One last point. Lee Burke mentioned earlier and John Connolly both have characters who speak to the dead. This is occasionally unrealistic and awkward. Gruber pulls this off seamlessly. This is the best new novel I have read in 2005. 5 stars. Larry Scantlebury