The Bottom Line: A five-star time travel novel for the 21st century. Highly recommended.
Let’s be honest – usually, you really can judge a book by its cover. Not so with Frank Cavallo’s Eye of the Storm, where a top-shelf fantasy novel lies beneath a book cover that only a mother could love.
Eye of the Storm begins in Toronto, where soft-spoken, unassuming 37-year-old anthropologist Anna Fayne is laying the groundwork for a research mission to Kyrgyzstan. In a war-torn area, it seems that an Army Ranger team was attacked by a tribe of Neanderthals. Anna shows photographic evidence of a specimen that was killed only after taking eighteen bullets.
As you might have guessed, Fayne soon finds herself on the expedition herself, and she’s joined by former Navy SEAL Eric Slade. Together, they’re caught in an epic storm that transports them to a lost world full of wizards, the undead, and yes, hordes of nearly unstoppable Neanderthals.
With this book, the talented Mr. Cavallo enters a genre of notable time travel books, most recently Thomas Davison’s Past is Present, Douglas E. Richards’ Split Second and Stephen King’s 11/22/63. But Cavallo distinguishes himself amongst the pack with a truly original land where sorcery rules the day, and the past isn’t immediately recognizable as our own. His expert characterization doesn’t hurt, either. Among fictional anthropologists, Fayne is incredibly sympathetic, and it’s easy to imagine her being played by any number of Hollywood A-listers on the big screen.
Eye of the Storm is one book that is guaranteed to grip you from the get go. Read it.
