The Mayan Glyph

by Larry Baxter

Fast-paced action-adventure novel following an explosive virus from the jungles of Mexico's Yucatan to the U.S.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Julie H. Ernstein]

This book read like Preston's The Hot Zone meets Stephenson's Snow Crash . While categorized as "adventure," it is light on the typical ham-handedness when it come to male-female relationships. The novel contains great juxtaposition between ninth-century Maya science and the 21st-century investigators trying to identify and contain a mysterious, Ebola-like retrovirus. For anyone interested in the pre-Columbian world this is a really fun read, and it has enough side-plots and comic relief to make it truly enjoyable. My one critique would be that the team of experts brought in from Boston University were the biomedical folks, whereas the Mayanists were drawn from Harvard. B.U. (my alma mater) has several reknown Mayanists, so author Larry Baxter could easily have stayed on one side of the Charles River if he'd wanted to--and this might even have afforded him an additional subplot of watching one department try to out-maneuver another despite a disaster of global proportions. I'd have to say that my favorite thing about the book is the fact that even when a cure was discovered, there was still a significant time-lag before it could be delivered to the thousands of infected individuals. Moreover, the author rightfully acknowled the fact that much work would need to be done to test birds and other small animals to determine that the "Black Tongue" had not jumped species. This was a fun, fast read, and I thoroughly recommend it. Unlike Preston's book, this one is relatively short on the gore of the disease and longer on the flavor-text of the Maya world past and present.

[Zeljka]

Horribly written dialogues in desperate need of publisher proofing, confusing action parts, but the plot was interesting and the descriptions were intriguing. Having been on some locations that play a role in the novel, those descriptions aren't accurate despite the appearance, but that doesn't matter anyway for the whole story.

[Abbie]

this just is not a good book. Dumb. Poorly written.