WHERE THE SHADOWS LIE . . .

So, yesterday I found out, thanks to a friend in England* about yet another modern-day real-world book featuring Tolkien, or at least his writings, as major elements in the plot -- as in, 'what the world thinks is fantasy turns out to all be true'. This time it's not a Dan-Brown wannabe, as in MIRKWOOD, but a detective novel called WHERE THE SHADOWS LIE, by Michael Ridpath, the first of projected 'FIRE & ICE' series. The amazon site, where it's available for pre-order, has two reviews that praise it to the moon -- suspiciously enough, since the book won't be available until August. Perhaps, although they give no indication as to this, they read the English edition, where it's been out since last summer. Here's the plot synopsis from amazon.com:

"Amid Iceland's wild, volcanic landscape, rumours swirl of an eight-hundred-year-old manuscript inscribed with a long-lost saga about a ring of terrible power. A rediscovered saga alone would be worth a fortune, but, if the rumours can be believed, there is something much more valuable about this one. Something worth killing for. Something that will cost Professor Agnar Haraldsson his life. Untangling murder from myth is Iceland-born, Boston-raised homicide detective Magnus Jonson. Seconded to the Icelandic Police Force for his own protection after he runs afoul of a drug cartel back in Boston, Magnus also has his own reasons for returning to the country of his birth for the first time in nearly two decades - the unsolved murder of his father. And as Magnus is about to discover, the past casts a long shadow in Iceland. Binding Iceland's landscape and history, secrets and superstitions in a strikingly original plot that will span several volumes, Where the Shadows Lie is the first in a thrilling new series from an established master."
Taken along with the recent books by Dowling and Hillard, does this mean we're on the cusp of a flood of Tolkien-as-character/it's-all-real/modern-day Middle-earth fiction like the 'Tolk-clones' explosion of the seventies & eighties? Are Hillard and Dowling and Ridpath the McKiernans and Donaldsons and Brooks of this new decade?
I sure hope not.


--JDR


*thanks, Jessica