I've got one more review to round out my series of Katherine Neville posts for you this week and it's The Magic Circle.Ariel's cousin has died and left everything to her, including a batch of strange manuscripts everyone but Ariel seems to have heard of.
But that's not exactly true - Sam isn't dead. It turns out the manuscripts in question are the key to unlocking a centuries old mystery. And while some would die to get their hands on them, others would kill for them instead.
The Magic Circle begins with the last days of Christ before jumping to 1989 and Ariel's piece of the story. This time around, in addition to the very real historical figures (Jesus and his followers, Hitler, Genghis Khan... Neville also infuses Native American legends, Greek/Roman mythology, and origin tales into the story. She also uses her experience working at a nuclear test site as inspiration (Ariel has just that job, in fact).
Like The Eight, The Magic Circle is another big book. But like The Eight it is also fairly fast paced and completely entrancing. First, I'm a sucker for books about books (yes, I'm a sucker for a lot of things), so the idea that our plot is centered around a cache of manuscripts that people will go to ridiculous lengths to get their hands on is definitely enough to get me interested.
Second, having read Neville's The Eight, this one was actually next on my list to try. I do tend to read through an author's collection once I've discovered them. But The Magic Circle proved a bit more difficult to get my hands on, which is again why I'm so grateful that Open Road Media has released these new e editions!
To date Neville has only published four novels, the ones I've featured this week as well as The Fire, a sequel to The Eight. She's said to be working on a fifth book as we speak, one that would have been (I believe) the project she was trying to start when The Magic Circle took over.
Rating: 3.5/5
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