Reviewed by Donna
TITLE: Accidental Prophet
AUTHOR: Bud Gundy
PUBLISHER: Bold Strokes Books
LENGTH: 264 Pages
RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2019
BLURB:
Intelligent, handsome, and struggling to make his rent, thirty-year-old Drew Morten loses his only meaningful relationship when his grandmother dies. A famous television anchor, Claudia Trenton, leaves Drew the legacy of her secret memoir. From the fate of a vanished medieval prince to a top-secret NASA study about a mystifying space object, her unreported discoveries hum with wonder.
But history merges with the present and upends Drew’s life when he has a terrifying revelation. Teaming up with a brilliant woman who receives the same vision and a handsome man whose arrival is either fortuitous or sinister, Drew follows the clues in his grandmother’s memoir and races against time to save the world from an apocalyptic nightmare about to be unleashed in downtown San Francisco.
As catastrophe looms, so does the question: Who, or what, is the real enemy?
REVIEW:
This wasn’t what I was expecting at all. Well, no. That isn’t quite true, because having read and absolutely adored a previous book by this author, I went into this expecting an extremely well written book that would keep me riveted from beginning to end. And I did get that. But while the previous book I’d read by this author kept me guessing through a murder investigation before delivering answers, Accidental Prophet continuously dropped twists, turns, and wriggly little subplots into my lap before presenting me with only half the answers. I want those answers, so I really hope that this is only the beginning of Drew’s story and that Accidental Prophet becomes the first in a series.
The story is told in several points of view, and in several different timelines, but at no point does the switch become confusing. At first I wanted to skip the paragraphs from the 1960s, where Claudia told her story, but I quickly came to enjoy the perspective of this fiercely determined woman who was driven to succeed in a male dominated society. This is one of those books where you need to be open to knowing all the characters, not just Drew, as every person included in the story is important and linked in some way. It’s like, in 1970 Claudia has the briefest interaction with a random person, and nearly half a century later so does Drew, and we discover that they were sent there for a reason. In fact I love the idea of the Prophets. These people who receive visions that they must “save the child” or go to a certain place, or pass on a message, and they do it while never understanding the bigger picture, but knowing it’s important.
Like I said, the characters are pivotal in driving the plot forward, and one of the most important characters is Victor, a homicidal Russian spy and would-be mass murderer of millions of people, who we first meet as a sexually abused, unloved child. Wow, so I cried for Victor, not just the broken child who was raped by his father and abandoned by his mother. Not just the youth who thought he was being rescued but was instead sent to live in a mindfuck of a Russian training facility. But I also felt for that adult who was so broken by that point that he felt the only way out was to take down the city around him in a blaze of screams and death. Victor absolutely broke my heart, and I loved that the author could make me feel so much for the man who played the part of the novel’s “bad guy”.
This book probably won’t be for everyone. It’s kind of hard to classify just what it is. It’s a bit of a spy thriller, a bit paranormal, a whiff of sci-fi, there’s a gay love interest for Drew, and a good part of the story is told through the diary entries of a trail blazing female journalist in the 1960s. I personally enjoyed the mishmash of genres that made up this book, fingers crossed the author gives us more.
RATING:
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