Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More great Dunning for book lovers!, 19 May 2007
The third book in John Dunning's "Cliff Janeway" series is another compulsive page-turner. If you've only just discovered this author I recommend you start at the beginning with "Booked to Die", although these can probably be read in isolation as well. Watch out for Book 2, "The Bookman's Wake" which gets quite intense on the intricacies of the bookbinding and printing theme. The series are skilfully woven detective novels in their own right... but with a "book collector" theme, book lovers, collectors, and booksellers will just love them!
The Bookman's Promise opens with ex-cop, now recently established bookseller, Cliff Janeway purchasing a rare Richard Burton first edition for the staggering sum of $29,000 at auction! The sale of the book sparks a load of media interest across the US and Janeway gets a lot of calls from chancers hoping to sell him their "Burton" books. Then one day a very frail elderly lady turns up in his Denver bookshop. She's spent her last money on the journey to see him and claims Janeway's recently acquired prize possession as her own!! Her claim is that her grandfather Charles Warren travelled the American South to Charleston with Burton in the tense year before the outbreak of the American Civil War. The lady's health is failing rapidly... but all she's ever wanted is to find the rest of her grandfather's extensive collection of books by, and related to, Richard Burton. Can Janeway help her?
Really good, some great twists. Recommended for all book lovers.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Bookman delivers on his promise, 7 May 2006
In a number of ways, this book invites comparison with /The da Vinci Code/. There is the same use of a specialist profession and its particular knowledge (Dunning's protagonist is, like Dunning himself, a rare books dealer). There is a historical mystery (did Burton travel through the USA's southern states, immediately prior to the Civil War?) with hints of conspiracy (was he spying for a British government intent on fomenting conflict?), whose resolution entangles a contemporary thriller puzzle storyline with conspiracy elements of its own. There is a love interest subplot between two strong characters, a dash of betrayal, and innocent victims fall along the way.
But: /The Bookman's Promise/ is an infinitely better book than /The da Vinci Code/.
First and foremost, it's infinitely better written. Brown's book contains interesting fictions which could be developed, but then survives purely on the on the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief, be intrigued, and resist the urge to laugh. Dunning, on the other hand, holds a reader by his ability to tell a story well. Incidents in Brown's narrative are episodic pyrotechnics, with the story there only as a scaffold between them; in Dunning's they are embedded as part and parcel of the evolving story itself.
Then there are the characters who populate the book. Brown's characters are two dimensional cardboard cutouts with only just as much depth as is required to carry the events; they are not real. Dunning's characters, by contrast are rounded and alive; you have to care about them. Most of them are good, warm hearted people (though they have their share of failings), who care about one another; there are a couple of out and out villains, but for the most part the baddies are just fallible human beings with back stories built on feet of clay - even the central act of betrayal is a sordid accident bitterly regretted rather than a deliberate act.
Where I finished /The da Vinci Code/ despite an urge to bail out at the end of every chapter, resisting a constant tendency to fall asleep, /The Bookman's Promise/ drew me on through, constantly absorbed, from the first page to the last. This is despite the fact that I have a passing interest in some of the ideas in Brown's book but none whatsoever in the setting of Dunning's. I have not the faintest glimmer of interest in the rare books business, but I nevertheless felt Dunning's (and Janeway's) love of this trade seeping out of the pages and through my skin.
I'm left with the inescapable feeling that Dunning loves both the human race and what he does; that's a wonderful combination, rarer and more precious even than a Burton first edition. Janeway ends the book disappointed in his fidelity to his own promise, but Dunning lives up to his for me.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"To Charles Warren, a grand companion and the best kind of friend...the time we shared will be treasured forever.", 15 Jan 2008
This inscription from explorer Richard Burton to his friend Charles Warren in a book Burton wrote in 1861 kicks off a literary mystery in which a contemporary former police detective, Cliff Janeway, comes to the rescue of a little old lady and makes her a promise. Jo Gallant, the aged granddaughter of Charles Warren, claims that this particular book, along with the rest of a substantial collection of Burton memorabilia, was stolen from her grandfather's estate eighty years ago. Janeway, now a "bookman" who buys and sells antique books, promises to find the collection and bring the culprits to justice, if any trace of them can be found.
As the search gets underway, author John Dunning inserts long historical recreation, in which Charlie Warren and Richard Burton travel together to Charleston and Fort Sumter in 1860, leading Charlie to suspect that Burton is spying for England, taking advantage of the pre-Civil War tumult in the Union. This story, based on Burton's notes and drawings, Charlie's journal, and a photograph of the two men, all part of the stolen memorabilia, fill the search for Jo Gallant's collection with color and historical excitement and give life to the friendship of Burton and Warren.
As the story of Charlie and Burton is further developed with Jo's recollections of her grandfather, as revealed under hypnosis, the old and the contemporary story intersect, and violence soon shatters the life of Janeway. A murder, a house fire, the theft of documents, the influence of the criminal underworld, sleazy book dealings, and beatings and mayhem keep the action quotient high as Janeway seeks the remainder of the collection and the killer of an innocent person.
Though the book is great fun to read, it relies heavily on coincidence to make connections between the stories. The reader is never allowed to forget the presence of an author who is actively pulling strings to keep the two-phased plot moving. The story does not evolve naturally out of the characters and their lives. Instead, the peripheral characters seem created for the purpose of moving the story in the "right" direction. This artificiality ultimately affects the reader's enjoyment of the story. The third novel in Dunning's five-novel Janeway series, The Bookman's Promise is fun to read for anyone who loves books, but it suffers from a lack of editing that might have improved the relationship between the two separate stories and tidied up the plot. n Mary Whipple
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