The Reckoning

Assigned to cover an army search for a thirty-years-missing military plane and its pilot in the former killing fields of Cambodia, photojournalist Molly is warned by a local overseer to avoid ghostly wanderers who appear to move within the pictures Molly takes. By the author of Year Zero.

Long (Year Zero, etc.) delivers a suspenseful, tightly written tale of a nightmarish journey into the dark past—and present—of Cambodia's former killing fields. Molly Drake, a would-be photojournalist, accompanies a U.S. Army-led search for the bones of a pilot shot down during the war. She meets Duncan O'Brian, an archeologist at a local dig, and John Kleat, who has come back to the country repeatedly, seeking his brother's remains. When bones unexpectedly turn up, Molly photographs them, breaking her agreement with the army not to take pictures of bodies. The captain in charge dismisses her along with O'Brian and Kleat, and the trio make their way to an ancient, fog-enshrouded Angkor-like city where they have evidence an army patrol went missing years ago. They soon find themselves lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone, in circumstances that quickly grow as dire as those in which the patrol evidently found itself. Long's considerable knowledge of Cambodian folklore and history is put to good use as he superbly depicts the war-scarred country, its people and its beautiful, hazardous landscape—lush, verdant, strewn with land mines, studded by bones. Although the inner lives of the characters are not as detailed as they could have been, the author's use of supernatural elements is subtle and effective, and adds an extra dimension to this solid, coolly told, smoothly paced narrative.
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Long's new book is in some ways a "choose-your-own-adventure" novel. It may--or it may not--be a ghost story. It may--or it may not--have a happy ending. Some readers might be confounded by the ambiguity, but the majority will go with the flow and be thoroughly entertained. The book centers on Molly Drake, a photojournalist who takes an assignment as liaison with an American team of MIA investigators in Cambodia. At this point, it's no longer a search for the living, just the bones of the dead. Long invokes a powerful sense of nightmarish^B existence in a place where one's next footstep could land on an unexploded landmine. Molly and the rest of the party fight their personal wars with fever and injury during a relentless quest for the MIAs, spurred on by the oncoming monsoon season and also by rumors of a legendary city hidden deep in the jungle. Perceptions of reality blur, commingling the modern world with the sinister beauty of a civilization that has its roots in the dawn of recorded history. Elliott Swanson
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