Empire of Shadows by Jacquelyn BensonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is pulp - intentionally so - with both the strengths and weaknesses that implies.
In terms of strengths, it's an exciting adventure with a Smart, Plucky Gal and a Hunky-but-Sensitive Man going into the wilds of British Honduras (now Belize) after a legendary, and apparently magical, artefact, in contention with a sinister and capable villain representing a shadowy cabal. The characters have personal weaknesses as well as strengths, have believable reasons for (in her case) not being initially honest and for (in both cases) not pursuing the romance they both come to want, and they are clearly of good intent. The storytelling and pacing are sound, and the emotional arcs well executed. The intelligent young woman is actually intelligent, both in that she knows a great deal about archaeology and in that she doesn't make obviously stupid decisions and have to be rescued from the consequences every five minutes (she rescues him at a key moment, in fact), and the decent guy is actually decent, which for me makes for an appealing romance couple; when the romance heats up, even without being explicit it's steaming hot, partly because they have such good chemistry. Ellie is also a more convincing archaeologist than, say, Indiana Jones or Lara Croft; she does her best to prevent the destruction and/or looting of archaeological sites, and values them primarily for the knowledge they hold. (view spoiler)
I went into the book not knowing anything about British Honduras in 1898, but the local detail felt authentic and gave the impression of an author who'd done the research; someone who knows more would very likely spot errors (judging by the issues I saw in the aspects I do know about, of which more below), but to someone like me who knows nothing about the setting, it's more than good enough to pass. I assume the discovery of another civilization ancestral to both the Maya and the Aztecs is part of the fiction, but (again, to a layman) the author sells it convincingly.
It's a long book, but the pace never lags, and I didn't feel tempted to put it down and read something else.
In terms of weaknesses, it requires an Accidental McGuffin Discovery followed by a Convenient Eavesdrop to get the plot in motion, and that's not the last coincidence either (turns out there's another connection between the chance-met main characters that raises the stakes of the romance plot). The characters have some lucky escapes, too. (view spoiler)
Like practically every book written by a 21st-century American with 19th-century British characters, it has a good many minor anachronisms (like a character who's being laid off asking about "severance pay" in 1898, and phrases like "sociopathic human lie detector," which is two anachronisms for the price of one); Americanisms in the mouths of British characters ("someplace," "off of"); and instances of incorrectly used vocabulary (like "malingering," which means pretending to be sick to get off work, used for someone who's been lurking around and spying); several British idioms are also used incorrectly, particularly "the rub" used to mean, I think, "the nub." The errors generally consist of substituting a word that sounds vaguely similar to the correct one, but means something completely different, which for some reason is a characteristic problem for fiction written in the 21st century but set before World War I. I think people attempt the more formal English of the Victorian era and end up using words they think they know, but actually don't. "Laid" is consistently used where the word should be "lay," too, and "arcana" is used as if it was both singular and plural (the correct singular is "arcanum").
The author is better than average with commas, apart from coordinate commas, which hardly anyone seems to get right, and which her volunteer editor, fellow author Olivia Atwater, is also bad at. She only messes up apostrophes occasionally, but makes almost every mistake it's possible to make with hyphens (again, Olivia Atwater is particularly bad at hyphens): putting them where they don't belong (such as between an adjective and the noun it modifies), not putting them where they do belong (such as in numbers between twenty-one and ninety-nine), or putting some but not all of them in compound adjectives like "two-thousand-year-old". She also misses the occasional word out of a sentence.
I also get the impression that the author is, at best, vague about the distinction between a rifle and a shotgun, which if you're writing adventure fiction you really should take the time to learn.
Note that I read a pre-release version via Netgalley, and some of these issues may be fixed by publication.
Still, although - like practically every book I read these days - it could benefit from more polishing, it's entertaining, suspenseful, fun and features a likeable couple, and I enjoyed it.
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