Disciple of the Dog

September 27, 2010
The cleverness Bakker displayed in his Prince of Nothing fantasy trilogy (The Darkness That Comes Before, etc.) is lacking in this suspense novel introducing Disciple Manning, a Newark, N.J., PI who can remember everything he has ever heard. Jonathan and Amanda Bonjour hire Manning to track down their missing 21-year-old daughter, Jennifer, who's joined a New Age cult known as the Framers, dropped out of nursing school, and is possibly now living at "the Compound," an old horse farm in southeastern Pennsylvania that serves as the cult's retreat. The Framers' leader, former Berkeley philosophy professor Xenophon Baars, has persuaded his followers that the world is more than five billion years older than it is and is about to end. Manning heads to the Compound in search of Jennifer, though he suspects she's already dead. A crude, off-putting hero with a flatulence problem may leave few readers eager for a sequel.

November 1, 2010
Newark private eye Disciple Manning has total recall of every conversation and experience hes ever had. Kind of like TiVo, without the monthly fees, he says. In this series debut, Disciple replays elements of his investigation over and over again, looking for nuances of meaning as he searches for 21-year-old Jennifer Bonjour amid the followers of an apocalyptic cult in a desiccated Pennsylvania town that is also home to a white supremacist church. Fantasy author Bakker (The Judging Eye, 2009) has an appealingly glib style, and his cult leader and white-supremacist preacher respectively radiate an otherworldly charm and a manic menace, but the character of Disciple needs some work. Narrating the story, Disciple explains at great length that his gift/curse of recallas well as being too clever, too arrogant, and too damned good-lookingmakes him superior to, well, just about everyone. Other than quoting an ex-girlfriend, who called him pathologically self-centered, Disciple fails to acknowledge his own limitations in any way (though the unlikely denouement of his search for Jennifer speaks for itself). Still, Disciple deserves another chance to shape up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)