Linda's Reading Lounge: A Review of Clonmac's Bridge

Clonmac's Bridge: An Archeological Mystery
by Jeffrey Perren

A review by Linda Root with a giveaway copy for a lucky winner
Please see below

Professor Griffin Clonmac is a bit of a celebrity in his field, a maritime archaeologist whose rather startling finds have given him a reputation among television viewers as archaeology's talking head. In the competitive world of academia, that is not always a good thing. The professor has his enemies, not the least of whom is Daley Garvin, a university colleague who unfortunately outranks him and makes a practice of interfering with Clonmac in any way he can. Not long into the book we suspect there is more going on with Garvin than academic rivalry. He seems to have a powerful behind-the-scenes collaborator in his effort to bring Clonmac’s career to ruin.

Garvin’s new target is his rival’s long-time obsession with an almost mythical Irish Bridge, which Clonmac believes to have once spanned the River Shannon. When it seems that Professor Clonmac has a shot at finding it, the going gets dicey. Clonmac’s chances of locating and raising his bridge is no better than his funding and at first Daley seems content in making certain none is found. But as Clonmac refuses to let go of his dream, Daley and his co-conspirator begin interfering with more than money. By the time Griffin Clonmac has selected a potential dive site, he has been thwarted and bamboozled at every turn, and the worst is yet to come. Some powerful person or entity is willing to spill blood.

Meanwhile, nearly half a world away another archeologist is having problems of her own. Aristocratic Mari Quesne, daughter of a wealthy man with political connections, is about to have her project pulled out from under her because her father thinks her profession is inappropriate for someone of her station. He demands she shift her energies to getting married and raising children, and he has the clout to have her license to dig revoked when she refuses. After any chance of a career in South America dissolves, she has no offers but one in Ireland. Even before professors Clonmac and Quesne combine forces to raise the bridge, their associates begin dying. Mari loses a young assistant in a cave-in and Clonmac’s new protégé is murdered while on a dive.

Not long into the book, Perren introduces a parallel story line involving another man’s obsession with the bridge—a ninth century monk with a mysterious superior who seems intent to keep Ireland in the Dark Ages. Thus, two heroes emerge—the man who sought to bridge the River Shannon at Clonmacnoise Monastery in the ninth century, and the twenty-first century celebrity archeologist who seeks to raise it from its watery grave.

The book is not without its share of intriguing twists. There is a side adventure in the world of corporate high finance and a not especially flattering glimpse into the politics of the Roman Church. While a romance between Mari and Griffin is predictable, it is not the only love interest in the story. It is also refreshing when some of the villains turn out to be rather decent after all. Perren keeps his readers hooked by hinting that as bad as the bad guys are, there is a bigger and much darker force lurking backstage pulling their strings. His artful plotting provides clues suggesting the same force that struck out against Brother Riordan in the ninth century may be behind the assault a thousand years later on Griffin Clonmac’s dream.

As the story develops, the bridge itself becomes an object of mysterious properties. It has been submerged for ages and yet remains remarkably preserved. Its condition attracts the interest of board members of an American chemical company whose self-serving motives lead to their funding of Professor Clonmac’s project, but it does not explain why they and other individuals and institutions who should be most supportive of Clonmac’s plan to raise the bridge are precisely the ones determined to sabotage it. The author does a fine job of keeping the secret of the bridge’s mysterious properties obscure until very close to the final paragraph and the book’s successful conclusion.

Jeffrey Perren is a highly-credentialed writer and his skills as a wordsmith are high caliber. The book is well written, researched and edited with only a handful of formatting errors in more than four hundred pages of complex text. He seems as if he would be comfortable on an archeological dig. He also knows his medieval Irish history and a good bit of the politics of the early church. Overall, Perren’s characters both major and minor are well drawn and the historical setting is adequately researched. Any lack of passion in the romance that springs up between the archeologists is excusable, since Griffin Clonmac’s first love is the bridge.

In conclusion, in spite of the crowd of distinguished authors writing in the action-adventure historical fiction hybrid genre, there is room for Jeffrey Perren’s books on the shelf. I am making space in hopes of adding more. While it is not among the much clichéd page turners, Clonmac’s Bridge is a surprisingly satisfying reading experience which I recommend to readers who enjoy the works of Steve Berry, Ken Follett, Douglas Preston and others who meld the past with the present and come up with a taut mystery worthy of the genre.

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For your chance to win a free copy of Clonmac's Bridge, simply comment below or at this entry's associated Facebook thread. 

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You can also buy Clonmac's Bridge at Amazon and Amazon UK. 

About the Author

Jeffrey Perren

Jeffrey Perren is the author of Cossacks In Paris, historical fiction set in the Napoleonic era, and many other novels. He wrote his first short story at age 12 and went on to win the Bank of America Fine Arts award at 17. Since then he has published at award-winning sites and magazines from the United States to New Zealand.

Jeffrey's influences are Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, R.F. Delderfield and E.M. Forster.

Educated in philosophy at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and physics at UC Irvine, he lives in Sandpoint, Idaho.

Jeffrey's blog

Jefffrey's Twitter page

Jeffrey's Facebook page

                             Linda Root is the author of  The First Marie and the Queen of Scots.

Rob reviews Troll by Richard Sutton

Troll by Richard Sutton 

Reviewed by Rob Bayliss

Please see below for giveaway details!

Troll begins in a high valley in present day Norway. An excavation of a cave has yielded an archaeological anomaly. What this anomaly is, and how it has occurred, we won’t discover until the very end; to do so we must travel back thousands of years to a prehistoric time, when there were more than one species of hominid walking the earth.

We are introduced to the clan who once dwelt in the cave. A young clan member called Mokolo is mourning the death of his father, a renowned hunter called Slatolo. Mokolo is clever and dextrous and has the task of crafting traditional hunting spears with fire hardened points. We learn of the ways of the clan: a highly organised matriarchal society, dominated by the elderly Clan Mother, a skilled healer, oral archivist and seer who never leaves the ancestral cave.

The clan are hunters and gatherers living in a dangerous world. They have to contend with predatory cats with huge knife-like teeth and have an uneasy truce with the Great Cave Bears who they fought with long ago in order to claim the cave as their own. Lately however, a new and more dangerous enemy has entered the valley below. They are men, but not like the Clan. We learn that Slatolo himself was slain by these other men, using tiny feathered spears, with flint blades. The Clan is greatly troubled and the Clan Mother wishes for the Clan to discover the secrets of these “arrows”. Mokolo is charged with copying this new technology, which he does, but the new spears seem useless when thrown, even when using spear throwers. It is known that the newcomers can “throw” them accurately and at great speed.

To have any hope of successfully resisting the newcomers the Clan Mother insists that the secret of launching these tiny spears must be learnt. The Clan Chief, Datolo, takes Mokolo and the Clan Mother’s granddaughter and acolyte, Anas’kala, to spy on the newcomers. The spies watch a hunting party of strange fair men launch the arrows using bent sticks strung with sinew. They return to the cave to report their findings and Mokolo is put to work reproducing what he has seen. Successfully learning the craft of bow making and archery, through trial and error, the scouts are sent out again to ascertain the newcomers’ numbers. The Clan Mother fears the newcomers and their intentions, knowing from oral tradition that they have always exterminated clan folk in the past.

However, the spies do not go unnoticed by the tribe of newcomers. The Tribal Seer convinces the Chief that the Clan is a direct threat to all of them and demands, that as the tribe's best hunter, Anson lead an expedition of eradication to the Clan's high valley. But Anson's daughter is gravely ill and the only cure available forces him to question where his tribal and individual loyalties lie. 

Troll is a beautifully written book. Mr Sutton has done a great job in creating and describing the Neanderthal culture and society, at once similar yet different to our own. I found myself completely absorbed by the story, with its undercurrents of racism, ethnic cleansing, fear and ignorance of the “other”. Personally I found the idea that the mythology of trolls, with their coarse features, could be an ancient folk memory of earlier hominids a wonderful notion. It has always been supposed, from previous studies of the fossil record, that the distinct Neanderthal culture was pushed to the periphery of their ancient hunting grounds by technologically superior modern humans and were subject to genetic bottlenecks as advancing ice packs isolated them further, pushed in fact, to extinction. But was this truly the case?

 New research sheds light on these tough evolutionary brothers of ours. They had elaborate funeral ceremonies; this suggests a spiritual belief system. Therefore, like us, they most probably looked at the stars and philosophised about their existence. They lasted 200 millennia and survived numerous ice ages. They invented tanning, to waterproof their leathers. They wore beads and jewelry and shared their caves with body lice which indicates that they wore clothes. It suggests that modern humans actually copied the Neanderthals’ wisdom and technology to a great extent. We intermingled then, and as modern Europeans share 
1-4% DNA with Neanderthals such intermingling may have got very passionate indeed!
These were not simply the brutish fur clad cavemen of popular myth; it may well be they were and are us!
　

Troll is available for Kindle and as paperback at Amazon. There is also a free copy up for grabs---from Smashwords for an eBook format--and all you do to get your name in the hat is comment below! Facebook users may also comment here. 

This review was written by Rob Bayliss. Rob is currently working on his Flint and Steel, Fire and Shadow fantasy series. Part one, The Sun Shard is available at Amazon.

If you would like Rob or any of The Review Group team to review your book, please check out the submissions tab above.