Some combination of mood and music lead me to wolf down a, the fourth book in Kage Baker’s series about that mysterious future Company, between last night and today. No good soccer matches to watch I suppose. Ha! Though tomorrow our Men take on El Salvador in Foxboro in a World Cup qualifier which’ll be shown live on FoxSportsWorld…
[Baker has a Company short story, Standing in His Light, available on the SciFi website if you’d like a little taste of her writing.]
The Graveyard Game focuses again on Joseph, working with another cyborg, Lewis, a literary recovery specialist who also holds the now missing Botanist Mendoza in a special place in his heart. (The third Company book, Mendoza In Hollywood, is next on my list to read but the gist of her plight is discussed thoroughly in this story.) Joseph and Lewis travel all over the globe and through several hundred years of real time to pursue her, careful all the while to hide their interest and activity from their bosses. Quite dangerous.
Baker also inserts several mysterious little interludes of Joseph talking to Budu, the enormous and even more ancient Enforcer, explaining the basics of what’s going on in ways she couldn’t contrive to fit in the normal flow. That’s another part of the plot, Joseph’s attempt to find Budu and the other Enforcers who he hadn’t scene in a millenia.
There’s also the building tension, not resolved here, of what will happen in the climactic year of 2355. Several factions are now clear and which of them, if any, will prevail then is clearly driving the series’ overal arc. Baker is a really good writer, though her non-Company oevre seems to be mostly fantasy, stuff I don’t care for, but I need to keep my eye out for the remaining volumes.
(I also decided I had to have the first book, In the Garden of Iden, and so popped $5.60–shipping included–to get it from a seller on eBay.)
recommended
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