It's Literary Curtains for Eileen Reed: The Thirteenth Skull
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Author: Bonnie Ramthun
Title: The Thirteenth Skull Genre: thriller Talk about your busman's holiday: no sooner does Eileen Reed arrive at her parent's Wyoming ranch than a body appears behind the chicken coop. Though hundreds of miles out of her jurisdiction, Reed naturally hopes to figure out who shoved a pre-Columbian stone knife into the dead archaeologist's heart. With her only suspects the two other archaeologists - nasty-dispositioned ivory-tower vegetarian academics - and a gaggle of salt-of-the-earth wealthy hunters visiting the ranch to scout for their upcoming elk hunt, the Colorado Springs homicide detective should be able to make short work of the case. Should be, that is, if she can get past the animosity the current sheriff holds for her over some high-school slight. It's a simple locked-room case for Reed, since no other suspect could possibly have sneaked onto the ranch past the three-legged herd dog Zilla ("dog-zilla": get it?); so the discovery of an Aztec relic, one infused with enormous power, stashed on the ranch by the dead man complicates matters but little. Unbeknownst to Reed, however, her fiancé Joe Tanner is at this very moment making his way to Reed Ranch, fleeing a Mutt & Jeff team of homicidal maniacs who've already tried to kill him once. When the assassins trail Tanner to the ranch at the foot of Devil's Tower, all hell breaks loose, and that ol' murder case is promptly solved and pushed to the side. Instead of a Miss Marple moment - "Professor Plum in the Parlor with the Pliers!" - the denizens of the ranch find themselves running ahead of a man so profoundly evil that he hates Ronald Reagan. Besides Tanner, Reed, her family, the archaeologists, and the hunters; the group also includes Reed's matron-of-honor-to-be Lucy (a CIA analyst), Lucy's husband (a former mafia wheelman - no kidding), and their toddler son; plus the local Schwan's truck driver. The calculated risk of flight, unfortunately, plays directly into the hands of the evil ones. Thank heavens for deus ex machina... The third (and apparently final) novel in Colorado author Bonnie Ramthun's Eileen Reed series, The Thirteenth Skull is mostly a ménage of disparate plot threads flung willy-nilly at the page. Though it starts out as a police procedural like prior Reed novels (Ground Zero and Earthquake Games), any "mystery" aspect is abruptly short-circuited when a character suddenly confesses - with 100 pages to go. With that minor detail out of the way, Reed and company immediately enter into a desperate race for their lives - though why a dozen experienced woodsmen, at least half of them heavily armed, don't just hide the wimmen 'n' chillun in the ranch house safe room and shoot it out with the invading tenderfoots (one of whom weighs close to 400 pounds) is beyond me. Toss in some pseudo-Native American mysticism and the heavy hand of the Coincidence Fairy, and it's all over but the shouting. In a nod to bodice-ripper fans, readers can expect the occasional heavy breathing; including a monumentally embarrassing incident involving a sexy red thong and a grumpy sheriff... An
d in a separate nod to the supernatural/fantasy crowd, Ramthun also shoehorned in a visitation from an angel (who happens to be Tanner's previous fiancée, murdered several years ago by the Reagan-hating fat guy). The crowning touch, though, is the insertion of snippets from a Mesoamerican legend of a baker's dozen crystalline skulls (c.f. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull); particularly the assignment of supernatural powers to the thirteenth - which just happens to be the one Reed and company found. As the plot of The Thirteenth Skull bobs and weaves madly across its pages, the magic skull's powers wax and wane in direct proportion to how much anyone needs them at the moment - that "anyone" apparently including the author. Deus ex machina, indeed... On the character front, prior Reed novels had plenty of stereotypes, mostly those with whom the author has political differences. The Thirteenth Skull is no different: this time out, we have both a villain within and a villain without. The villain within is one of the archaeologists, a stunning beauty made hideous from a psyche twisted by abject hatred for those who eat meat - which, of course, is everyone else on the ranch. Odd thing about that ranch, by the way: they have horses, but no cattle... The second is the killer himself, whose twisted worldview is manifested in his hatred for Ronald Reagan, the greatest American president (this apparently because out of "deep principles" Reagan provided his late father's name in his HUAC testimony). Oh - and to make matters worse, he's French (the novel's copyright 2003, of course). Ramthun's heavy-handed moralizing, where "moral" is defined as in political agreement with the author, unfortunately makes for predictable and uninteresting characters. Besides the oddly unbovine ranch, other oddities crop up in The Thirteenth Skull. Perhaps the most difficult to explain from a logical standpoint - ignoring for the nonce a pre-Columbian massively parallel supercomputer - is the apparent failure of a CIA background check to find that one of its analysts is married to a former Mafia "chauffeur." While the first two books in the Reed series were published by Random House, the third was published by a tiny Loveland, Colorado-based press. This copy includes a preview of another Ramthun book, Queen of the Night, which apparently never made it into print. After a five-year hiatus, the author published a YA title (The White Gates) in 2008, which also incorporates "Indian lore filtered through white chick"; though at least it's not so politically heavy-handed. Perhaps Ramthun no longer listens to Rush while writing... If you seek a mystery novel set in the Front Range (or thereabouts, given that Devil's Tower is almost in the Black Hills), by all means give this one a pass - instead, see if you can find some of the now out-of-print works by Denver author Rex Burns. They are worth the search. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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