Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

Book Overview

The startling reviews of Tropic of Night announced Michael Gruber as one of the most talented thriller writers to debut in many years. Now, with the much-anticipated publication of Valley of Bones,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060577665
• ISBN13: 9780060577667
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 436 Pages
• Weight: 1.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A thinking person's thriller

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

Michael Gruber Gets Inside Catholic Faith

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.

A Thriller and More

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 d

Scary & So Good it'll Make You Cry

Miami Police Detective Morales is out if front of the Trianon Hotel when a body falls from one of the rooms. Detective Jimmy Paz (of TROPIC OF NIGHT fame) joins him in checking out the stiff's suite and up there they find Emmylou Dideroff on her knees, praying. It looks like an open-and-shut case. Emmylou describes the victim as a Sudanese man who deserved to die. The killer had taken a connecting rod to his head and Emmylou's prints are on that rod. Paz tells Emmylou she had better confess or she could receive the death penalty, to which she replies that it would be an honor to be executed unjustly, like Jesus himself. Paz thinks the woman is crazy, how could he not. She says she'll write out her confession and asks for four of those old-fashioned black and white composition books and begins to write. In her narrative she writes that she'd been raised poor in Florida, that after her father died her mother married the local police chief, who in turn sexually abused Emmylou. She spent her teen years planning how to kill him, before running away and earning a living as a lady of the night, then she hooked up with a big time marijuana dealer, eventually getting shot during a police raid. Luckily she escaped the cops and wound up in a school run by the Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ, who minister to innocents trapped in war zones. There she was brought back to health, embraced Catholicism and came to believe that she had been redeemed for a special role in God's plan. She goes on to tell how she went to Sudan with others of her order to minister to refugees from the civil war. She is a student of military history, and after witnessing atrocities against the refugees and finding a cache of weapons, she begins to train an army. She becomes a modern Joan of Arc, leading her army against the government forces. Emmylou's experiences are illuminated by saintly visitations, damned by demonic possession, and driven by the voice of God. And now a lot of people, included Paz's father don't want those notebooks to come to light. Is Emmylou God's instrument on earth as she truly seems to believe. Paz can only wonder as the story races to a climax that puts its characters in conflict with a terrifying evil. This story is even better than TROPIC OF NIGHT which was the best book that I'd read last year. It's early in '05, but I'm thinking this is going to top my list this year as well. You definitely cannot go wrong with Michael Gruber. Andy Raven, Raving United Fan

A novel of character

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