#gideon's sword

[quoted-books]

The truth shall make you free, but first it will make you miserable.

Douglas Preston, Gideon’s Sword

[forthishaunting-blog]

Book Review: Gideon's Sword, by Preston and Child

     The authors, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, are certainly not new to the crime-thriller scene. They have over a dozen New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Bestselling novels and an enormous fan base numbering in the millions, myself included. They’re excellent authors, and I strongly recommend them to anyone with darker tastes in literature. That’s why when Gideon’s Sword came out in hardcover, I had to have it. However, it didn’t quite seem to fit the template of the earlier novels I’d so thoroughly enjoyed.

     The beginning two chapters serve as the preliminary exposition- painfully curt and hastily written, almost as though it was added as a sort of afterthought. Basically, the main character Gideon Crew, twelve years old at the time, finds himself witnessing a hostage situation. His father, a leading computer encryption scientist during the Cold War, has barricaded himself inside a Government research facility. He’s enticed outside by a police negotiator, and then brutally shot down by a Hollywood-style onslaught of hot lead.

     We abruptly jump forward about ten-ish years; Gideon is now a professional art thief with an unreal [I use this term in the literal sense. Some of the themes go better with a grain of salt.] Skill set and a multitude of underworld contacts. His mother [again, this scene is over as soon as it’s begun.] is dying of tuberculosis in the hospital. She reveals to him the real story- Her father was betrayed! Egad! Her mother begs him, as he pleads with her to save her strength, to seek revenge on the awful men who did this. The cliché completes itself when her eyes close for the final time.

     Jump ahead another decade, and Gideon has it all planned out. He engages in an incredibly thoroughly-plotted, perfectly-executed plan involving method acting, cyber crime, phone hacking and even a shootout. This is where the novel really starts to stray away from the template, and gets more heavily involved. Instead of a bunch of twist-the-handle revenge tactics, this is merely the initial incident. He avenges his father with a quick, albeit still darkly satisfying, shot to the back of the head with a Colt .45.

     Then, the real beginning- This novel is nothing if not the very essence of a tour-de-force. It doesn’t conform to the ‘traditional’ plot structure of an action novel. He’s recruited by a government agency, working under the guise of a failure-analysis engineering company, to track a Chinese scientist with a huge secret. He has many encounters- A rather idealistic prostitute, a couple of Hispanic drug dealers, and a trio of prison guards on New York’s infamous Hart Island where prison chain gangs bury the nameless dead. Each is so well-written, so laden with the unrefined and discordant emotions of the more tragic side of the human experience, that I’m compelled to believe that the authors actually paid visits to these seemly characters! In fact, upon later consultation with the website, I learned that the authors did, in fact, make a highly illegal guerrilla landing on Hart Island. [Why they advertised this on the Internet, I honestly don’t know...]

     The novel eventually reaches its climax after a great deal of impeccable method acting, illegal break-ins galore, a pulse-pounding, heart-in-your-throat sniper battle and a bulldozer hijacking. I’ll freely admit, I read the entire novel in the space of the six hours after I bought it. I really enjoyed the way the story seemed to refuse to conform to a typical plot structure. However, I think the usage of the atypical plot line either forced the authors to trim the proverbial fat from the preliminary exposition, or forced them to generate an impromptu, second rate piece.

     In addition, the actual revenge plot ‘works’ too well for my liking. There are too many elements in play; too many considerations to make, for Gideon to have possibly planned it out fully. It doesn’t constitute as much of the bulk of the novel as I believe it should’ve, for the reason that it could’ve been drawn out to much greater dramatic effect and subsequently more enjoyable.

     I won’t ruin the final plot twist, because I’d still genuinely recommend this novel to more advanced reader. Suffice it to say, however, that it’s a very revolutionary idea. I didn’t enjoy it as much as some might, for the simple reason that it represents a marked departure from the more macabre themes I’ve come to expect from the authors. I’ll give credit where it is due, however.

     In summary; this novel has dozens of glowing reviews from all the big-name critics [The New York Times, Kirkus Starred Review, The Wall Street Journal, etc.] And it has earned all of them. Some of my opinions may be obscured by the fact that I burned through this book in about six hours [a testament to the non-stop action and sheer adrenaline rush.] I would sincerely recommend this book to anyone with a post-secondary reading level and some real time on their hands; the book falls just short of 400 pages in the large-set, hard cover edition. The film version is currently underway with Bay Films, to be directed by Michael Bay.