Review: The Boy Who Saw

The Boy Who Saw by Simon Toyne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The second Solomon Creed novel, like its predecessor, is a pretty marked shift in tone from previous Simon Toyne works. While The Searcher had a very Jack Reacher-esque contemporary Western style, The Boy Who Saw, though continuing the light speculative elements from Book 1, is about as different from Book 1 as it gets, a little more like Steve Berry did a collaboration with Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Taking we the readers to France and plunging us deep into a Holocaust-rooted conspiracy, with more than a few long hard looks at the neo-Nazis keeping racism alive, Toyne does an expert job balancing these supremely distasteful elements with smaller, more personal scenes of Solomon Creed bonding with Marie-Claude and her son Leo, a comic-book fanboy in the making whose synesthesia forms a superpower all his own.

This book, though the second in the series, is largely standalone and comprehensible to anyone who hasn't read The Searcher. Aside from a few sprinklings of more sin-eater kind of details throughout - particularly near the end, just like in the first book - The Boy Who Saw forms what I'm hoping to be a good bridge between two great books in a trilogy. Or perhaps Solomon Creed won't be simply a trilogy like Sanctus was. Who knows?

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