Where Maddock Follows Clues in the American Southwest

Cibola by David Wood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pretty good. Not my favorite, but I'll read another by this author.

This is a pulp fiction adventure, like a modern-day Doc Savage or something, and it works pretty well. I've liked two previous books by this author. Somehow, this book didn't work as well for me, and I read it sporadically. Too much stopping and starting makes it hard to love a book, and this is probably more entertaining if read straight through, but it didn't hold my interest that well.

It's a good setup for a story--a genuine lead on Cíbola and the seven cities of gold--taking the story to the American southwest and a quest for lost artifacts, both aboveground and below. To a large extent, it works, but I don't really like sequential stories like this, where they find one thing which leads to another and another, like a shopping list. The last third is pretty fun again, as is so often the case, and I bet if I'd read it in bigger chunks closer together I'd have liked it more.

I often like digging up 1920s or 1930s pulp fiction, and that's pretty fun, and this is probably better than that in just about every way, so it's still recommended if you have a taste for such stories. Many readers gave it a 5, so I might be the wrong guy for this particular title.

Anyway, a 3 is still a recommendation--if cautious. Take a look for yourself.

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