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- The Bookman's Promise
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- Author: John Dunning
- Reviewer: Sonali T. Sikchi
- Publisher: Pocket Books, New York
- Format: Adult, Fiction, Paperback, 470 Pages, 2005, $7.99
- ISBN: 0743476298
- Rating: * *½ Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0743476298/scriquil
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- The Bookman's Promise is part historical fiction, part book collector arcana, part cop thriller and part romance. It is part of a series featuring former Denver cop turned rare bookseller Cliff Janeway and his love of books, book collecting, nosing out mysterious circumstances surrounding histories of books and spouting pithy quotes, such as: "In those early Internet years, I posted an epigram over my desk, 'A book is a mirror. If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.' That was written two centuries ago by a German wit named Lichtenberg, but I think the same thing applies today to a computer screen."
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- Janeway has just paid a hefty sum of $29,500 to acquire a real gem: a pristine signed first edition by famed nineteenth-century explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. He is then invited to a literary dinner at the house of U.S. District Court Judge Lee Huxley, who is also a book collector. There he meets Hal archer, a writer whom he much admires and who is a boyhood pal of Huxley. He is introduced to attorney Erin d'Angelo, who is Lee Huxley's goddaughter. The main topic of conversation at the party turns out to be Burton and people's rising interest in his work.
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- This is followed by days of crank callers interested in Burton, followed by a visit by a 90-plus-year old woman at his bookshop on East Colfax in Denver. Josephine Gallant claims that her grandfather traveled in the South with Burton just before the Civil War, a fact that had so far remained unrecorded in the written historical records on Burton. She further claims that Janeway's expensive auction purchase is rightfully hers, as is a stolen library of Burton books including, a handwritten unpublished journal of inestimable value. While this initially seems to Janeway like the unraveling of an ancient mind, certain events immediately following this meeting convince him to set off on a search for the books.
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- Following extensive research, Janeway attempts to retrace Burton's and Gallant's Grandpa's steps through Baltimore and Charleston. Along the way he is aided in his task by d'Angelo, Koko, and others. He soon gets embroiled in the perilous history of the library that someone is willing to kill to keep secret.
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- This entire story starts out with details unfolding at an almost luxuriously slow rate. The scene between Gallant and Janeway is one of the finest in this book: tender, mysterious and imbued with layers of human emotions handled with care and tact to do any writer of literary fiction proud.
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- However, a third of the way through the book, as the action tightens up, the book deteriorates into a characterless, hackneyed, Grisham-esque story, with Dunning's characters running around doing impossible things.
For example, 60-year-old Koko is hares off with Janeway, whom she barely knows, to parts unknown in South Carolina, with barely a few twinges of regret for her house with a lifetime of memories that has just burned down. Characters don't need to be sacrificed at the altar of plot in order to add thrills to a story. Take Elizabeth George's books, for example. The characters are what make the story exciting; take them away, and the plot will deflate like a poorly made soufflé.
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