The Bone Key Curse, Mike Scantlebury

This story ended in justice. I’ll give it that much. On several levels, this book didn’t work for me. Starting with the title. There is a bone key, but we never find out what it’s for.

This is book seven in the Mickey from Manchester series. There are currently sixteen books in the series. This is the only book in this series I’ve read. I was asked by the publisher to do a review of this book and was given a free copy of the book. Not sure after this, they’ll want to give me another one.

First the story. We are landed in the middle of an archaeological dig where a ship from Roman times has been found in England. On the ship are pots with writing on them. British Army special forces are guarding the archaeologists. The main character is the lead special forces officer on the site. The artifacts found in this dig have upset religious fanatics because they believe the pots with writing on them could disrupt Christianity. Early on, they attack the party setting them on the run with many of the pots.

The premise is interesting, though the execution fell short for me. I always cringe when writers use violent Christian fanatics, portraying them as if they represent all of Christianity. This book wanted to be like Dan Brown’s books. And unfortunately, where it succeeded was in the ridiculous Christian conspiracies that The Jesus Seminar and Dan Brown are famous for. In essence, this book brings forward the premise that the entire Old Testament is made up and not history. In the story, even an envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledges this and claims his boss believes this. The writer really needed to do more Biblical research before writing this story. The Bible is one of the most proved historical records in existence. And contrary to the claims in this novel, archaeological finds and the Bible generally agree.

The bulk of the story is two of the British Army special forces, Mickey and Melia, running around England trying to keep an archaeologist, a journalist and a policeman safe from the violent Christian fanatics while the laptop they carry crunches through the ancient text translating it and comparing it to other texts.

The book has a lot of action. However, the writer’s style didn’t sit well with me. The prose is way too wordy. Also, there were copious amounts of typos. We learn very little about Mickey, the main character, other than he’s a man of action and complains a lot because his teammates won’t always explain to him what’s going on with the translation.

In writing there is an axiom known as show don’t tell. This writer does that – shows. However, he then tells, over and over. This style didn’t work for me. Showing action, then telling us every minute thought the character has about that action and giving us paragraphs of commentary.

There’s a lot of head hopping when it comes to point of view. I prefer a consistent point of view within a section, with section breaks where POV changes. And if the writer was going for an omniscient narrator, it didn’t succeed for me. I enjoy omniscient narrators that have character. Think Princess Bride.  Another good example is Lord of the Rings.

Another picky thing that bugged me was the insane number and variations of saidisms. This means after dialog adding “he said [insert word(s)].” The writer added adverbs to almost every he/she said. Not a technique I like.

A couple of glaring technical errors jumped out at me and made me pause. The laptop they are carrying around has a hard drive with moving parts, so they are worried about tipping it. Solid state drives have been used in laptops since the early nineties. This book was written in 2018 and as far as I could tell was in a modern setting. Along those same lines, somehow this laptop keeps its Wi-Fi connection everywhere. This includes in an ancient cellar, in a boat down the river, in a car traveling many miles. It seems to automatically connect. Would have been much more believable if using a cell phone as a hotspot. But even then, it would have lost connection in the cellar and underground river. There are some severe blunders by Mickey, a seasoned army officer as well. One involves losing his gun.

One religious blunder really jumped out at me, other than the entire premise. The aforementioned envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury also said, “(God) moves in mysterious ways, as the Bible says.” Nowhere in the Bible is this statement.

There is profanity scattered throughout. No on page sex. The violence is minimal. This is not a writer I’ll read more of because he writes in a style that I’m not a fan of.

I’m ranking this one twelfth of the ones I’ve read this year.

1. Rooms by James L. Rubart
2. The First Lady by Ed Gorman
3. Every Dead Thing by John Connolly
4. Several Deaths Later by Ed Gorman
5. Citadel (Palladium Wars Book 3) by Marko Kloos
6. The Little Grave by Carolyn Arnold
7. Barrier Island by John D. MacDonald
8. Jake of All Trades by A.T. Mahon
9. Fireplay by Steve P. Vincent
10. Wrong Place Wrong Time by David P. Perlmutter
11. Nowhere Safe by Kate Bold
12. The Bone Key Curse by Mike Scantlebury
13. Run for Your Life by C.M. Sutter
    

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