โ Scribed by Easterman, Daniel
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Returning from a trip abroad to find the bodies of voodoo practitioners buried alive in her Brooklyn apartment, Haitian-born artist Angelina Hammel asks streetwise cop Reuben Abrams for help. Reprint. K.
Modern-day voodoo practices, a tentacular right-wing political conspiracy and its connection to slave-trading dynasties in 18th-century Haiti provide the mysteries around which Easterman ( Brotherhood of the Tomb ) fashions this uneven thriller. The impact of intriguing details about the slave trade and zombie lore and moments of high-pitched terror (set, for instance, in skeleton-littered, centuries-old secret tunnels beneath a Brooklyn, N.Y., wharfside warehouse), is diminished by Easterman's penchant for melodrama and his unclear characterization. Haitian-born Angelina Hammel lives in Brooklyn with her white ethnologist husband, who is murdered shortly after they return from a field trip to Zaire. When she discovers a collection of corpses beneath her living room floor, Lt. Reuben Abrams is assigned the case. Easterman's complex, far-ranging plot takes the two of them to bed and, after a series of violent murders, to Haiti as semi-informed operatives of a secret alliance of U.S. government officials--and as targets of a more powerful, high-ranking cabal. In that exotic setting, murders accrue--during an ancient night-long ritual; on the sea floor as a hurricane rages; in a church--leading to revelations about voodoo's sacred origins and a violent, unsurprising ending.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A dark and disturbing foray into voodoo-terror by a master of the religious-conspiracy thriller (The Brotherhood of the Tomb, 1990; The Ninth Buddha, 1989, etc.). From the opening pages, in which Haitian-born heroine Angelina Hammel finds a host of corpses hidden beneath the floorboards of her Brooklyn apartment, Easterman spins a morbid tale of unrelenting evil that's a far and eerie cry from the high adventure of his earlier work. In sinuous prose tinged with despair, the horrors pile up: one body is trapped in a living death--a zombi?; Angelina's ethnologist husband, Rick, is found murdered and mutilated in a nearby park; Reuben Abrams, the cop assigned to Angelina, uncovers a weird sanctum of evil beneath the Brooklyn waterfront, full of spiders, more bodies, the mummy of a sorcerer, and half of a golden disc. This disc, Abrams learns, is the talisman of the Seventh Order, a reactionary, voodoo-based global conspiracy that includes senators, judges, industrialists,'' and that prophesiesthe resurrection of all things when the true king'' sits on his voodoo throne. Members of the Order soon give violent chase to Angelina, whom they rightly believe holds information--derived from her husband's research--threatening to the Order. The brutal murder of Abrams's parents (partly repaid by the cop with a syringe through the assassin's eyeball) is only one atrocity of many as the duo, aided by a secret federal anti-Order cabal, fend off attack. Prompted by the cabal, Abrams and Angelina, now uneasy lovers, fly to the Order's homeground, Haiti--where the action turns darker still, a febrile shock-scape of voodoo ceremonies, torture, and death (and one whiff of Easterman past--an extraneous but rousing escapade during a hurricane) that ends in the bleakest possible way. More horror novel than thriller, grim and unforgiving, and resonant with menace, decay, and the stuff nightmares are made of. -- Copyright ยฉ1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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