My bad streak continues. I even gave it more than my usual 100 pages to decide but the story just never caught my attention. I am starting to wonder if I am just not in the mood to read right now. ( )

I always wanted to get a Ph.D. In Anthropology. After reading this, I think I’ve earned it.

This is an excellent book! Very well-written, incredibly well researched, a delight to read and so exciting. The concepts are intriguing and I’ll be thinking about them for a long time. ( )

Synopsis: An aristocratic anthropologist’s field leads out of academia and into African “magic.” Jane Doe is a rich and semi-spoiled Long Islander who has faked a suicide and gone into hiding as “Dolores,” a mousy medical-records clerk. In her former life, she was an anthropologist who studied under, and had an affair with, a brilliant Frenchman whose expertise in the magic practiced by isolated cultures led her well away from the usual tenure track and off through central Asia to Mali, where she picked up a few magic tricks of her own. Now, she’s hiding from Witt Moore, her husband, an African-American poet and playwright who, on their fateful field trip to Africa, also became steeped in magic—powerful and very, very nasty magic. Jane has recently complicated her fugitive life with the addition of Luz, an abused preschooler, whose mother Jane killed—accidentally—with an especially effective martial arts maneuver. It’s not a good time to be a mother in Miami, where a serial killer is drugging very pregnant women and taking the babies for what looks awfully like human sacrifice. Recognizing the murders as rituals from the lore of the Olo, the Malian tribe she and Witt studied, Jane knows that her husband is nearby and on the prowl and that it will now be necessary for her to practice her own arcane skills. In the meantime, Iago “Jimmy” Paz, a deeply cool Afro-Cuban Miami homicide detective with many, many ladyloves, is trying to sort out the gruesome string of murders as junior man on a team headed by an ultra-religious Florida cracker. And he’s about to meet Jane.
Review: Parts of this book are absolutely tedious, in particular the excerpts from the logbook. The rest is interesting and the characters are well drawn. ( )

in the middle of this one... i like it but parts of it are creepy so I can't read it at night (LOL!)
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finished this book - didn't like it as much as first Jimmy Paz novel, but very well done nevertheless. ( )

I am glad to have found this terrific writer and a new series to follow. In this thriller he blends all my favorite obsessions, anthropology, mysticism, spirituality, and sailing into a compelling journey through Africa, Siberia, privileged Long Island, and tropical Miami. I was hooked from the first page. ( )