I was afraid this same author might make Amy Cahill a silly love-struck girl again. He did it to her in "The Sword Thief" but this time, even though he introduced a love interest for her, he didn't make her behave too bad. But my grouse would be: why is it necessary to give her a love interest? These are a series of books for children between 11 and 14 - give us cool action scenes, lots of them, hold the love scenes. Lerangis's action sequences are better now. Our heroes fall in and out of scrapes in South Africa with smackdowns versus the Holts and their branch, the Tomas. They get a new champion in Professor Robert Bardsley and on the tail end of the book, they find out which branch they are in, plus the identity of the "man in black" who ain't so suspicious now. The hunt for 39 hidden Clues that lead to an unimaginable power have taken a heavy toll on fourteen-year-old Amy Cahill and her younger brother, Dan. They've just seen a woman die. They're wanted by the Indonesian police. They're trapped on an island with a man who knows too much about the death of their parents. And a tropical storm is rolling in. Just when they think it can't get any worse, it does. Because the Cahills have one more rattling skeleton for Amy and Dan to discover . . . the terrible truth about their family branch.
What do You think about The Viper's Nest (2010)?
Oooooookaaay... Latter part of it salvaged the whole thing from its mediocrity.
—Dave
