Review: Golden Chariot
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2013
Reviewed by: MarissaBook provided by: AuthorReview originally posted at Romancing the BookWhile the book started out a bit confusing, once I got past the first few pages I delved into this Mediterranean mystery whole-heartedly. Charlotte, a marine archeologist, begins her time in Turkey at the site of a sunken gulet (I had to look that one up - it's a two-masted schooner of Turkish design, built in Bodrum and used mainly on the coastal waters of the Eastern Mediterranean) and with the death of a colleague.Charlotte is a straight-forward type woman. Her mind is solely on her thesis and her career, on finding the link to Troy. She's doesn't take one look at Atakan and start thinking about sex like so many other heroines out there. I admired that about her. I also liked the fact that when faced with arrest, she is not a cool cookie - she paces and sweats just like the rest of us would. Every once in a while, she even gets her snark on. In other words, Charlotte is real. She is one of us, Dear Reader, more or less.Atakan, a representative for the Turkish Ministry of Culture, is as much a mystery as the rest of the story. I thought he exuded an authentic maleness about him, keeping the details of his case to himself and only hinting at his life in general. Even his feelings are held somewhat close to the vest. A part of me wonders if this is a characterization of the typical Turk male, stoic in all things yet passionate about the one thing that matters most - in Atakan's case, the art and history of Turkey.The one thing I would have liked to see was more embellishment in the descriptive text. While the author described an open grill and the smells wafting from it in detail, there was no real depiction of the undersea world they were exploring. That is one area I would have loved to see more of, to feel as if I were there diving with them.Lastly, and this has nothing to do with the writing or the story, the formatting in the PDF version is just horrible. I wouldn't normally say anything about formatting but in this case it is so bad that it makes the book hard to read. Some pages are formatted singly; others are formatted two-to-a-page. I found myself having to turn my reader and zooming in on one page then out on the next. I'm sure the Kindle and ePub versions must be formatted better, but beware if you pick up the PDF.