Afterlife or AFTERLIFE as it is often called, is one of those books that we just could not put down. You know the type: if there was some sort of emergency, you’d think to yourself, “just twenty more pages”. At the same time, it’s not exactly deep literature so there’s the lingering feeling that it’s pulpy and not “high art”. And yet, the book spoke to me from the beginning (I made a special request to read it), and it did not disappoint in this regard. It was a pretty addictive read, and this goes beyond the knowledge that it has already been optioned into a movie by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.
AFTERLIFE is a standalone book and is ostensibly about Detective Will Brody, and I was a little bit skeptical at this point, because his name sounds so similar to Will Graham and Nicholas Brody that I imagined that the two were somehow combined. I got over it pretty quickly. Brody is an FBI Agent that is dating his boss Claire McCoy on the sly. Sakey is certainly not shy about the graphic details of their lovemaking, and goes into pretty explicit details, so if that’s your thing then this book will heat up your summer.
They are on the hunt for a sniper named Simon Tucks who is a character that gets a few chapters of backstory to try to show his descent into evil. Oh, but before this reveal at the beginning of the novel, we get a flash of a character named Edmund in 1532 which seems to come out of nowhere and have no connection to the remainder of the novel. After some limber activity, Brody goes to a deserted downtown Chicago and…well, there’s so many twists and turns in this novel that even an early reveal is going into too much detail. Luckily, Sakey provides a clue in the title, so there’s that going for it. I don’t know how this would work in a film unless there is a real mind-bend, but in the form of a book, this at times graphic book works very, very well. It’s kind of like The Da Vinci Code without the religious context and perhaps a little more focused on the female. This will be the book everyone is talking about this summer, guaranteed.
Afterlife was provided by Thomas+Mercer in exchange for an honest review. It may be purchased from your friendly independent bookseller or other fine bookstores.
