Monday, February 24, 2014

Here Comes The Sun

I do like a writer who is prepared to stretch him or herself, and it’s fair to say that Adrian McKinty’s next offering, THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail), offers a dramatically different setting to his recent trilogy, which was set in Northern Ireland during the 1980s. To wit:
Based on real events, a story of murder in the South Pacific among a most peculiar sect of sun-worshippers.
  1906. Will Prior is in self-imposed exile on a remote South Pacific island, working a small, and failing, plantation. He should never have told anyone about his previous existence as a military foot policeman in the Boer War, but a man needs friends, even if they are as stuffy and, well, German, as Hauptmann Kessler, the local government representative.
  So it is that Kessler approaches Will one hot afternoon, with a request for his help with a problem on a neighbouring island, inhabited by a reclusive, cultish group of European ‘cocovores’, who believe that sun worship and eating only coconuts will bring them eternal life. Unfortunately, one of their number has died in suspicious circumstances, and Kessler has been tasked with uncovering the real reason for his demise. So along with a ‘lady traveller’, Bessie Pullen-Burry, who is foisted on them by the archipelago’s eccentric owner, they travel to the island of Kabakon, to find out what is really going on …
  I love that cover, by the way. THE SUN IS GOD will be published on July 24th. For all the details, clickety-click here

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Declan Burke has published a number of novels, the most recent of which is ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. As a journalist and critic, he writes and broadcasts on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Independent. He has an unfortunate habit of speaking about himself in the third person. All views expressed here are his own and are very likely to be contrary.