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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780060509552
ISBN number: 0060509554
Label: HarperTorch
Manufacturer: HarperTorch
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: 2004-01
Publishing house: HarperTorch
Release Date: January 27, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 535684
Studio: HarperTorch
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Jane Doe lives in the shadows under an assumed name. A once-promising anthropologist and an expert on shamanism, everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes.
Jimmy Paz is a Cuban-American police detective. Straddling two cultures, he understands things others cannot.
When the killings start -- a series of ritualistic murders -- all of Miami is terrified. Especially Jane. She knows the dark truth that Jimmy must desperately search to uncover. As their lives slowly interconnect, Jane and Paz are soon caught in a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil as unimaginable as it is terrifying . . .
Amazon.com Review:
This debut thriller should come with a warning--do not pick up if you have anything else planned for as long as it takes to read it! Tropic of Night is a dramatic, stylish, smart, and very strongly plotted novel, mixing anthropology, ethnography, sorcery, mayhem, and murder in an intriguing and wholly captivating story that ranges from Mali to Siberia, Nigeria to Miami, and never lets up. Jane Doe is a smart but listless graduate student when she encounters Marcel Vierchau, a French scholar whose lover she quickly becomes, following him to the strange world of the Chenka, a mysterious sect of Siberian shamans in whose society she quickly loses her scholarly objectivity--and nearly her life. Returning without Vierchau to the comfortable world of her wealthy family, she meets and marries DeWitt Moore, a grey poet who accompanies her to Africa on a field trip that turns him into a powerful shaman, awakens her own abilities to commune with the spirits of the Yoruba sorcerers, and again comes close to destroying her. Wary of Moore's new strength, she stages her own death and becomes a faceless member of Miami's underclass, but just when she believes she's safe from his reach, a series of bloody ritual murders of pregnant Miami women convince her that she is once again his target--and that anyone who comes between them, including her adopted daughter, will also meet a terrifying end. Michael Gruber delivers a fabulous, wholly original read that will linger in the reader's mind long after the last page is turned! --Jane Adams
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Rated by buyers 
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Another Gruber book that I just couldn't stop reading. Tropic of Night is an original, expectation-defying thriller tinged with dark - yet scientific - mysticism. Think Serpent and the Rainbow meets Silence of the Lambs. Having just read Gruber's recent "Book of Air and Shadows", I was expecting this book to be less mature - but I was completely mistaken. He juggles multiple stories, points of view, and tenses with ease. The story, the characters, and the writing are all first-rate and hard to forget, and there several bone-chilling scenes. (I felt that I needed a glossary to keep track of some of the African terms, and realized there was one - as I turned the last page of the book. It's at the end.)
Rated by buyers -
THIS IS A WONDERFUL NOVEL FROM SEVERAL STANDPOINTS. IT IS PAINSTAKINGLY RESEARCHED, LITERATE WITHOUT BEING PRETENTIOUS, INTERWEAVES SEVERAL SUBPLOTS SEAMLESSLY INTO THE TEXT AND FOR THOSE OF US WHO ARE INTERESTED, OPENS A HITHERTO CLOSED WINDOW ON A BELIEF SYSTEM THAT AT LEAST 5 MILLIONS AMERICANS SHARE'
Rated by buyers -
I read TROPIC OF NIGHT following a Martin Cruz Smith recommendation posted on his web site. Michael Gruber's writing has a lot in common with Smith, witty, intelligent and knowledge rich. The genre here is a mix of crime and fantastic. Kudos for all the Nigerian and Siberian supernatural anthro stuff. Difficult to follow but creative. The strength of this novel is the central character Jane Doe, female anthropologist. All the strong writing comes from or is about her and her newfound daughter Luz. The other principal character, the investigating Miami Cuban cop Jimmy Paz is not that interesting, and neither is his partner. The story is two to three stars only, but the real pleasure is in the pudding ingredients : this guy can really write.
Rated by buyers 
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The title of this review refers to this reader's inability to juggle the pieces in the beginning into a creative whole. The three stars refer to the brilliant writing of Mr. Gruber, who because of his considerable talent somehow manages to hook the readers' attention into a sprawling, confused and at times unbearably uninteresting book. The characters are intriguing but Mr. Gruber spends far too much time on describing inane supernatural phenomena, which might be of some anthropological value to students in grad school but of no interest to the general reader. Even Paz,(who stands out over Jane Doe), spends all his time in sexual wrestling with his girl friends, hardly does anything. Things happen, things get exposed and Paz dutifully shoots the villain in the end.
I am looking forward to Mr. Gruber's subsequent novel, hope he has found a better perspective since completing this novel.If There Wasn't Death
Rated by buyers 
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Why was it interesting? It was interesting to me in the suspension of belief sort of thing. But the anthropology was hard to follow and more than I cared to follow about west african mojo. Jane's journal was very personal in an unpleasant out-of-her-mind way. The olo, ifa, ulene stuff was over-detailed and forced me to work too hard to decipher the plot in all of it. The author's expression of Jane's mind was unsettling and the racism of the book was too guilt-ridden. It was a little scary when Witt would "come" for her - that's a good thing. But in the end I was disappointed that the entire story was just about the magic and suspension of western beliefs. Certainly an intelligent writer, and intelligence appreciated. But this book was not my cup of tea.
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