The Sun Is God

July 14, 2014
Based on an actual 1906 incident on New Guinea’s isolated Kabakon Island, this desultory mystery provides a striking contrast to McKinty’s previous book, the taut In the Morning I’ll Be Gone. The small German cult known as the Cocovores live naked on Kabakon, where they worship the sun and eat mostly coconuts, a regimen they believe confers immortality. When a member dies and an autopsy is performed on the mainland, murder is indicated. The region’s German government sends former British military police officer Will Prior, still healing from the traumatic carnage he witnessed in the Boer War, to the island. Insect bites, the group’s bizarre drug-laced diet, and their insistence that the death was natural, slow his inquiry. By the time he guesses the truth, his collapsing health and the Cocovores’ efforts to protect themselves jeopardize his ability to report it. Despite the fascinating historical details, the novel never makes its most enigmatic characters more than merely curious. Agent: Bob Mecoy, Creative Book Services.

August 1, 2014
In the early twentieth century, British lieutenant Will Prior is so traumatized by an inadvertent massacre at a South African prison camp, an incident for which he is highly decorated, that he plots his way out of the army and travels to New Guinea. Here, his military police service behind him, he lives contentedly with his servant girl. Then, in 1906, he's asked to investigate a curious death on the nearby island of Kabakon, populated by the Cocoivores, a small group of Western followers of August Engelhardt, who worships the sun by going naked and eating only coconuts. Accompanied to Kabakon by German officer Klaus Kessler and the redoubtable Englishwoman Miss Pullen-Burry, Will finds the truth almost too late. That the story of the Cocoivores is true makes it all the more fascinating and an intriguing frame for this entertaining and unusual historical mystery. Fans of McKinty's razor-sharp Troubles Trilogy, set in Northern Ireland, will find themselves in for something very different here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)