Review: A Petersen "Gem"!!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 26, 2012
I have to say, Christopher Petersen pulls his reader in every time. Secret Kinship departs a bit from the action/adventure of Tomb of Atlantis and Curse of Atlantis, but we are presented with an intriguing "what if" scenario nonetheless. Petersen has this excellent way of presenting plausible alternate history plot lines, as we have seen in Tear in Time.Secret Kinship opens with a mysterious night time run by an old man to a graveyard in mid 1800's Hannibal, Missouri. The old man reminisces about a boyhood friend for whose death he is responsible. He writes about the incident and his guilt in his journal. Flash forward 150 years, and the journal is discovered by a recently-retired police detective who is emotionally scarred and verbally abused by his co-workers. The retired detective becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of who the boys were, to the consternation of his wife (He leaves her with a lot of work to do on a building they are renovating--this woman was amazing; nailing up sheetrock, relating the history of plaster over lath, and she cooks! I thought for sure she was going to use the nail gun on him...).With much of Petersen's previous work, we kind of know where he is headed, but the fun is in how he leads us there, and the interesting twists and blocks that are placed in the path as we are finally surprised at the end, because it wasn't quite what we thought! He does a very credible job of messing with history. I definitely recommend Secret Kinship for lovers of historical fiction and mystery, and for an afternoon of enjoyable escape reading!