Author Description

The exhilarating epic adventures that began in Gordon Dahlquist's extraordinary bestseller The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters continues in The Dark Volume. The Dark Volume forges ahead with the impossible adventures of three unlikely allies washed ashore on the forbidding Iron Coast. Encountering a series of savage murders, Miss Celeste Temple, Cardinal Chang, and Dr. Abelard Svenson discover that their enemies are on the move and that the insidious glass books are far more bewitching---and lethal---than they'd ever imagined. Brimming with reckless desire, bold terror, and breathless suspense, this unique feat of the imagination will hold audiences in its dark thrall long after the novel has been devoured. Publishers Weekly Readers unfamiliar with bestseller Dahlquist's 2006 debut, The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, which is set in an alternate world similar to Victorian Europe, may have trouble following this complicated sequel, despite the preparatory word on what has already happened at the start. In The Glass Books, West Indies plantation heiress Celeste Temple, naval surgeon Abelard Svenson and criminal Cardinal Chang joined forces to combat an evil cabal that smelted a mineral into a psychotropic blue glass that captures human memory. Temple, who survived the previous book's cinematic climax involving a gunfight in a sinking dirigible, finds herself suspected of a series of mysterious murders, while Svenson and Chang discover new enemies to thwart. Too much going on at the same time, including less than engaging confrontations with various over-the-top villains, undermines a clever concept that may yet be the basis for a solid adventure series. (Mar. 31) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.