Synopsis
The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon hotel to investigate a routine disturbance call and, to his shock and horror, watches as a wealthy oil man plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence. Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for solving - or at least providing a plausible solution to - the so-called Voodoo Murders that left Miami burning months earlier.
Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover in the dead man's room a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou Dideroff. She emerges from a prayerlike state and says she wants to confess and asks for a pen and several notebooks.
What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects; he enlists psychologist Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou's explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes committed, of regular communion with saints - and with the...
The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson
Michael Gruber's second novel, Valley of Bones, like his first, last year's acclaimed Tropic of Night, challenges the reader to "accept the reality of an unseen world." In the first book, his focus was powerful African sorcery, brought to this country by an angry black man and used for criminal ends. Valley of Bones is equally fascinating and even more troubling because its subject is the power of Christian faith, as embodied in a woman who may be a saint or may simply be delusional. Either way, the tormented, painfully candid Emmylou Dideroff is one of the great characters in recent popular fiction.