Splintered Icon/Bill Napier

SPLINTERED ICON, the debut novel from Scottish astronomer Bill Napier, is one of those books that’s hard to categorize. It’s part contemporary thriller, part historical novel – and all thoroughly entertaining. Originally published in England in 2003 under the title SHATTERED ICON, it’s just been published in the U.S. by St. Martin’s Paperbacks.

Antiquarian bookseller Harry Blake is hired to translate and appraise the manuscript of a journal that’s hundreds of years old. Harry gets caught up in the story contained in the journal, which was written by James Ogilvie, a cabin boy on Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to the New World in 1785. Not surprisingly, some sinister characters express an interest in the journal and try to pay off Harry to double-cross his client, the British aristocrat who owns the journal, and give them the faded old pages. Harry refuses, of course, and that opens the door for all sorts of trouble and danger for him and some of his friends. Obviously, there’s something in the journal that’s very important to some present-day bad guys.

Napier cuts back and forth between Harry’s attempts to elude the villains and discover the secret of the journal, and the story of James Ogilvie’s adventures as a member of the expedition that has some secrets and murders of its own. The story stretches from England to the New World in the Sixteenth Century and from England to Jamaica in the present, and it generates a considerable amount of suspense along the way. I always enjoy a book that slowly peels back the layers of its plot, and Napier does a good job with that in SPLINTERED ICON. I enjoyed this novel enough so that I’ll definitely keep an eye out for Napier’s next book.