Jungle Up

February 15, 2021
A retired homicide detective braves the Bolivian jungles to rescue the woman he loves. While he recovers from an accident, Thomas Prescott is living in France and helping his sister, who has a child, an art gallery, and multiple sclerosis. Then he gets a very short call from former lover Dr. Gina Brady begging for help. Thomas and Gina had lived together in Seattle until the World Health Organization asked her to work on a tuberculosis outbreak and she chose Bolivia over Thomas. Now she's been kidnapped. After a friend sets him up with Papagayo, a former Marine who has contacts in South America, Thomas hitches a plane ride with a team of filmmakers and archaeologists in search of a lost Incan city. Upon arrival in Bolivia, he heads out with his little group, including a beguiling sloth, to track down Gina. The filmmakers' own party, which includes a young archaeology professor who's petrified of everything, an arrogant producer, and two former British Special Forces members on hand to keep them alive, helicopter into an area that a flyover indicates is the location of many ruins swallowed by the jungle. The reason Gina was kidnapped was to help a badly injured man who needs to be kept alive. Each group undergoes hair-raising adventures as the fates keep bringing them together and splitting them apart in their search for hidden treasure, pharmaceutical finds, missing persons, and archaeological fame. A fascinating backdrop, exciting adventures, plenty of twists, and perhaps too many plotlines.

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April 15, 2021
Doctor Gina Brady dumped him two years ago, going off to fight a tuberculosis epidemic in the Bolivian jungle. So he's startled when he hears her voicemail pleading, ""Please find me, Thomas! Please!"" He's Thomas Prescott, former Seattle police detective, and he gears up for a rescue trip. Why then does the author halt this narrative and spend many pages on a crew visiting the jungle in search of the golden--and maybe mythical--Inca city of Paititi? Trust him. In smooth, limpid prose he builds a stunner of a novel, winding up a series of tense situations and exploding them in scenes of shock and surprise. Each time you think you've reached the core of things--a missing child, the curative powers of botanicals, cancer medicine, the foul manipulations of Big Pharma, priceless Inca artifacts--the rug is pulled from under you. The mood at the end might strike readers as undeservedly joyous, but we've needed that. Perhaps we didn't need the recipe for cocaine, but it's there, too: dump the leaves of the coca plant into a vat, then soak them in chlorine and gasoline.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.