The Graveyard Game (The Company Series #4) by Kage Baker
BUY IT NEW
- $15.95 List price$15.15 Online Price$13.63 Member price(Save 14%)Limited Time Offer! Everyone receives the Member Price on books.
See Details
Reserve it at BN.com & pick it up in 60 minutes at your local store.
Enter a zip code
(Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: February 2005
- 304pp
- Sales Rank: 199,159
| More Formats | |
|---|---|
| Available in eBook | $9.99 |
Buy it Used: 6 copies from $4.95 See All Available
Customers who bought this also bought
Product Details
- Pub. Date: February 2005
- Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
- Format: Paperback, 304pp
- Sales Rank: 199,159
- Series: The Company Series, #4
- ISBN-13: 9780765311849
- ISBN: 0765311844
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
Baker's Company books are her trademark SF series, upon which her reputation and popularity rests. Baker is very popular and could sell as well as Modesitt. Note the sales figures for Anvil of the World in hc. This entertaining romp, the fourth in the Co
Publishers Weekly
This entertaining romp, the fourth in Baker's the Company series, continues the excellent premise: time traveling, immortal cyborgs who were recruited in the past as mortal children seek to enrich Dr. Zeus's Company by rescuing artifacts, artworks, information, endangered species and more. They've been doing this throughout the centuries, but now they're about to meet up with the year 2355, when their mission will end. Will they be retired with honor and rewarded for their service? Or is there a more macabre fate in store for them? Rumors about their future have abounded for centuries, and now the natty Literature Specialist Lewis and Facilitator Joseph, born in the Neolithic era, are searching for the truth, as well as for their missing friend, the Botanist Mendoza, who has disappeared, perhaps sent hundreds of thousands of years into the past, following her travails in the third book in the series, Mendoza in Hollywood. Readers unfamiliar with that novel (Baker provides a brief summary of the previous books) may wonder at the intensity of their quest, but Mendoza's whereabouts may reveal exactly what the company has in mind for the operatives it no longer wants in the field. Bouncing between centuries and locations (an interlude in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square in 2276 is especially amusing), Baker's latest stands on its own and will entice newcomers to previous titles in the series. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Kage Baker is best known for her time travel series about The Company, of which this is the fourth volume and, more recently, for her popular fantasy novel The Anvil of the World. Born in Hollywood, California, she has been a graphic artist and mural painter, a playwright, bit player, director, teacher of Elizabethan English for the stage, stage manager and educational program coordinator. She lives in Pismo Beach, CA.
Customer Reviews
A transition book in the seriesby PhoenixFalls
Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings
February 04, 2010: I did not expect to be able to count The Graveyard Game for my challenge; I thought I had filled all the categories this series could fill. However, Baker makes a dramatic change to her series in this volume, and that change opened up a new category for me: she dropped the first-person narration and switched to third-person omniscient, so that she could follow both Lewis and Joseph as they took their diverging paths to finding the truth about Mendoza and the other operatives that have gone missing through the ages.
Lewis was a very minor character in Sky Coyote; no one will ever rival Joseph as my favorite character in this series, but Lewis was a nice addition to the mix, being very different from both Mendoza and Joseph. While Mendoza is passionate and self-centered and Joseph is cynical and a delightful mix of self-aware and self-deluding, Lewis is a gentle soul, artistic and romantic and not at all concerned with (or a concern of) the larger issues of Company politics and the Silence. He has also been quietly in love with Mendoza for centuries, so when he starts to get wind that something nefarious is connected with her disappearance, he forces Joseph to let him help.This novel serves as a bridge between the first three Company novels, which were very narrowly focused around specific events, and the rest of series, which looks to be shaping up into a large, millennia-spanning epic. It also serves to move us very quickly from 1996 forward all the way to 2276, less than 80 years before the Silence that has caused such consternation among all the different factions in the Company. We get glimpses of the multitude of disasters that has depopulated the Earth and created the very childlike, Puritannical mortals we met in Sky Coyote; but Baker's focus is not on the world-building but on her characters. As Lewis gets more and more wrapped up in his investigation of who Edward Alton-Bell Fairfax was, Joseph is forced to confront all those things he had willfully blinded himself to for so long. The sections in his narration are the strongest of the book the same way Sky Coyote is the strongest volume in the series -- unfortunately, they are short enough that they can be set off in italics without risking eyestrain.This volume does its job well, filling us in on all sorts of stuff Mendoza isn't aware of, but it isn't as emotionally satisfying as earlier volumes. It feels like a transition book, and should be read as such -- valuable in the information it provides, but not capable of standing on its own in any way. Those that have been titillated by the hints dropped in the previous three books about the Company will start getting their answers here, but those that enjoyed the previous three books for their narrow focus on individual characters and events may think that this is the point where the series jumps the shark.
Loading...