Review: Kingdom of Bones

Kingdom of Bones by James Rollins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For the 16th time, James Rollins gifts the world with a stunning new novel about Sigma Force, and this time, he acknowledges from the very first page, with his author's intro, that it may be a bit of bad form on his part to release a novel about a viral threat so soon after Covid became a thing (and yes, Covid is acknowledged in the book, though more as a past event than anything else.) No, but this latest book is less about how viruses spread and more about why they exist, as philosophical as any of Rollins's past works if not more so, and yet as blazing fast as ever to the point where I got to read the whole book in (almost) one sitting. Bringing back Tucker Wayne and his war dog Kane after several years' hiatus (they still haven't had more than two solo adventures!), depicting a Belgian villain who fancies himself the second coming of King Leopold but make it corporate, following the journeys of Black missionaries rather than white colonists into the heart of Africa, and even making reference to the stories of a long-lived Black Christian king descended from Balthazar of the Magi (I admittedly hadn't heard about Prester John before, but then again there's a reason why Rollins is one of the best history teachers I never had in high school.) And as an autistic reader, I very much loved Rollins's inclusion of an autistic supporting character, Benjie Frey, whose passion for animals and Very Britishness makes me wonder if Rollins hasn't been watching at least one Fantastic Beasts movie in his spare time. Fair warning, though - this book will rip your heart out with one particular ending moment (for which Rollins also sends his apologies in the author's note at the end), but he promises some even more tantalizing adventures in that same note, especially since this is one of those books where Seichan doesn't really show up in the picture. Which means she's in for some major trouble next time...

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