Here Comes The Sun

Adrian McKinty’s THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail) arrived in the post to CAP Towers yesterday, and a handsome tome it is too. McKinty’s most recent offerings, aka the Sean Duffy Trilogy, are set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, so it’s fair to say that THE SUN IS GOD is something of a departure. Quoth the blurb elves:

Colonial New Guinea—1906: a small group of mostly German nudists live an extreme back-to-nature existence on the remote island of Kabakon. Eating only coconuts and bananas, they purport to worship the sun. One of their members—Max Lutzow—has recently died, allegedly from malaria. But an autopsy on his body in the nearby capital of Herbertshöhe raises suspicions about foul play.
  Retired British military police officer Will Prior is recruited to investigate the circumstances of Lutzow’s death. At first, the eccentric group seems friendly and willing to cooperate with the investigation. They all insist that Lutzow died of malaria. Despite lack of evidence for a murder, Prior is convinced that the group is hiding something …

  THE SUN IS GOD will be published on July 1st. For all the details, clickety-click here …

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 …