Search for the Sun
By Ellen Anthony
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REVIEW BY DAVID LAGRAFF
The main reason to buy an e-book is to get your hands on something unconventional. So if you're the type who doesn't like to go anywhere or explore anything new, then run like hell from this author, because Ellen Anthony's Syran mystery is about something old, something new, something borrowed and something that rapes and kills and then kills a whole lot more before it's caught. Search for the Sun is a unique blend of fantasy and reality, which combines the cop-toughness of a McBain epic with the seamless fantasyscape of a Burroughs tome (Edgar Rice or William S., take your pick.) Some of the people on planet Syra are indigenous, and some of them dropped in on the locals a thousand years ago when their spaceship ran out of gas or their civilization collapsed. The two races mixed here and there, but not perfectly, and there's been political and religious tension ever since. It's like our own thing about who came over on the Mayflower, and the Demicans and Republicrats and all that. But on planet Syra, the mixing of alien blood and local talent eventually produces one Donal Yorkson, who happens to be the truth-seeking and very likable hero of our mystery. When we meet Donal for the first time, we discover he's really just a big strong kid, a 16-year-old green pea guard pulling routine night watch in a podunk berg where things run peaceably medieval in tone and texture. It's the time of the Harvest Festival, and you've got that Burrough's thing going, with a queen, a walled city with peasants who harvest things and even a high priest presiding over a bit of sun worshipping to keep everybody mellow. But mellow flies out the window when Donal walks into a murder scene from hell, replete with a downstairs septet of freshly poisoned servants and a naked lady of royal blood lying knifed, bloody and raped beside her scarred-for-life squalling infant. The high profile murder investigation that follows provides a dark twisty passageway for the coming of age of young Donal, a passageway filled with palace intrigue, ripe glimpses into places strange and beautiful, and wry observations about Syran life from which we can aptly draw proverbs for our own troubled times. Search for the Sun is a one of those other-world books that takes you to another place so you can escape for a time, relax and get a better look at what's missing from your own downtrodden existence. Author Ellen Anthony won a prestigious Eppie award for Search for the Sun, so you know you're getting quality stuff for your buck. Not just an empty calorie snack, it contains powerful insights from the heart and soul of a great writer. Read it at work and fall behind on the boss' big, boring corporate intranet project. Then join me in spirit as I sit in my lifeless cubicle anxiously awaiting her sequel, coming this month. Reviewer David G. LaGraff is the free-spirited "50-something" author of five cutting-edge novels available at Wordbeams. You may contact him to express your delight or anguish at his ravings: dlagraff@concentric.net.
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