I
have never read a novel by Mark Pryor, so in the beginning,
I was a bit put off by some of his style and writing. I guess
I was looking for some cohesive links to be made clear before
the first hundred pages of this book. That said, once I got
into The Blood Promise, I could NOT put it down.
Pryor is a captivating writer and he touched on things that
are relevant in many of the lives of everyday people who like
to find things out and love to research lost histories.
Hugo Marston and Tom Green are Agents. Agents of what, one
is never really sure, but they are welcomed by Police, CIA,
FBI and most local alphabet letter soup groups of detectives
who are trying to solve crimes. They are on a jaunt to Paris
with a Senator (Charles Lake) who is trying to break a deal
with the French over some obscure islands that not many people
really care about. They are working with the French in Paris.
All hell
starts breaking lose and people start dying, No one seems
to know why. An old lady is trying to protect a Sailor's Box,
or safe, that has something very important inside. Something
written back in 1795 and forgotten for 200 years, that was
signed by a man named Pichon in his own blood. The box mysteriously
shows up at a Chateau outside of Paris where the talks are
to take place with our senator and several high placed figures
in the French government.
Mr. Marston
has an interest in old things, doesn't know about the murder
to get the Sailors Box, or the reason the man (Henri Tourville),
who owns the Chateau, doesn't want anyone to take fingerprints
after the senator complains that someone was in his room the
night of their arrival. A necklace shows up at a local jeweler's
that has questionable ties and may be part of the missing
things from the box.
Alexandra
Tourville, the sister of Henri, does genealogy as a sort of
part-time pass time. There is a lot of consternation about
the privacy of the estate, and the family and one wonders
why so much is left unsaid, when the truth would solve a lot
of things right away. But the reasons for the privacy becomes
understood when the letter that is inside the box comes known.
A really nice French policeman is killed to protect the box,
a young lady is killed because she did little things to throw
people onto the scent of the trail. Alexandra Tourville is
skilled at games.
This really turned out to be a great book, and I am happy
to say that I thoroughly enjoyed how it played out: good characters
for key players who all have penchants for thumping their
partners a bit, goading them a little too much at times, but
that just enhances the ways that the people push their minds
a bit further. I have studied genealogy and that part of The
Blood Promise really got inside my head in that area
of the book. Good stuff that makes me want to get further
into my own genealogy to see what I can turn up. The Blood
Promise makes every reader think more about the little
things that we don't know about..... I am going to get hold
of Pryor's other two books, just for the fun of my mind whirling
around to figure them out. I wonder if the end of this book
is really true? I will have to check out many things to see
just what happened to the real or made up Blood Promise as
written by the old man, Pichon in the letter that opens this
Hugo Marston novel.
Reviews
of others in this series
The
Blood Promise #3
The
Button Man #4
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