Jaguar Prophecies

This is definitely a different genre for Jeff Wheeler — urban fantasy rather than high fantasy. It’s set in the real world, present day, and this continues the Dresden Codex series. I wasn’t that into the first book in this series, for some reason. I think I just didn’t identify with the characters enough to be emotionally involved with them. I felt the same at the beginning of this book, but they grew on me as the stakes grew even higher.

The story follows Jonathan Roth, a NYT bestselling author whom I suspect is at least to some degree based on Wheeler himself, and his teenage children, Suki, and twin boys. His wife Serena didn’t appear in this installment, as at the end of the last book, Roth was forced to leave her behind in Mexico in a diabetic coma after they won the Mayan Death Games, with the assumption that she would never wake up. His family won the financial spoils from their opponents, as well as a promise that they would survive the coming apocalypse, when the Jaguar priests from the ancient Maya taking over the world in retaliation for their conquest thousands of years earlier. But they lost their freedom, as they weren’t allowed to speak of what they knew, and Jacob, the leader of the shapeshifting priesthood, kept tabs on them at all times.

Suspecting that they were not entirely safe, Roth found a safehouse off the grid, and with his newfound wealth, hired private guards for his family. Meanwhile, Roth couldn’t sit by and wait for the end of the world, though; instead, he wrote a new book under a pseudonym about all of it, and was doing research to learn more of their plans and ultimately expose them. This is what sets off the chain of events in this book: Jacob and his henchmen are after Roth and his family once again, and Roth must enlist the help of a skeptical FBI agent in order to survive.

Once the action gets going, I raced through to the end.

My rating: ****

Language: none

Sexual content: none

Violence: none 

Political content: none

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