A prize bull destined for the barbecue is found pawing the corpse of a late restaurateur. Wolfe is certain that Hickory Caesar Grindon, the soon-to-be-beefsteak bull, isn’t the murderer. But who among a veritable stampede of suspects—including a young woman who’s caught Archie’s eye—turned the tables on Hickory’s would-be butcher? It’s a crime that wins a blue ribbon for sheer audacity—and Nero Wolfe is the one detective audacious enough to solve it.
Gene Wolfe has stymied and delighted smart science fiction readers for years. His complex, multilayered narratives, untrustworthy narrators, and puzzle-box characters send those of us who like that sort of thing into paroxysms of thrilling speculation, re-reading, and just plain guessing what it all means. In Green's Jungles is the middle book of Wolfe's opus trilogy, The Book of the Short Sun (the first is On Blue's Waters).
Launching a three-book series, Wolfe's latest takes place several decades after the close of his acclaimed four-volume the Book of the Long Sun. There, it was revealed that the great artifact called the Whorl, unbeknownst to its millions of inhabitants, was in fact a failing spaceship and that the AI "Gods" that ruled the Whorl wanted its inhabitants to leave and colonize two nearby terrestrial planets, Blue and Green.
Patera Silk, a young priest aboard the generation ship known as the Whorl, finds himself both the unwitting leader of a band of revolutionaries and the pawn of godlike forces trying to reshape a stagnant society. The latest installment in Wolfe's "Book of the Long Sun" series offers tantalizing hints of an ancient history lost to the Whorl's inhabitants. The author continues to prove himself one of the genre's most literate writers and luminescent thinkers. A familiarity with earlier series books is helpful but not absolutely necessary. Most libraries should own this title.
Wolfe continues the saga begun in Nightside the Long Sun with this curious mix of science and medieval culture in which gods possess people and robotic police patrol mysterious underground passageways. Patera Silk, a young cleric, attempts to ransom his parish buildings from creditors; in the process he uncovers a larger conspiracy involving the government of Viron and even the gods he worships. Emerging from the underground with his new knowledge, he finds himself chosen as leader ("Calde") of the masses and is simultaneously arrested.
