First of all, a friend of mine got this through a Goodreads giveaway and told me I just had to read it.

It was good. Not great. Not bad. Just good. The majority of the book is centered around the characters' attempts to translate a recently discovered Mayan text which may hold the key to a new disease that's spreading across L.A. To me, the connection between the Mayan Codex, the disease, and the linguist's home village is just too convenient to be believable. In fact, there were several times where I actually said, "Gee. That's convenient." while reading. It didn't necessarily HURT the narrative, I just had to suspend my disbelief a little more than usual.

Selecting a rating for this book was tough as the whole narrative was VERY well written (I could not put the book down during the last 70 pages) and I immediately fell in love with the story of Paktul the scribe. The author has obviously done his homework on both Prion based diseases and Ancient Mayan civilization and he manages to seamlessly impart this knowledge to the reader. However, I can't ignore the fact that I found myself rushing through the majority of book, which takes place in modern times, just so I could get back to the story of Paktul and the collapse of Kanuataba.

This is also a book that is built on plot twists, of which there are many. These twists were interesting, but I thought the foreshadowing was a little heavy-handed as I saw most of them coming from a mile away. In some cases, I found myself yelling out the answers to some of the riddles 40-50 pages before they were actually revealed. Once again, this didn't ruin the narrative, but it did impact my enjoyment of it.

Overall, this book is a solid 3 stars. I could make an argument for more, but I could also make an argument for less. I definitely don't think it should be anywhere near the top of your purchase list when it's released in August, but if your looking for a quick and interesting read, or you're really into the Ancient Mayan civilization, this might be a good book to pick up.

P.S. To Mr. Thomason, not sure if it was intentional, but the Harold Camping joke in the epilogue was priceless!