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Eroded by Power
The Book of Unforgivable Sins follows a resurrected immortal and a reluctant archaeologist who must recover a forbidden spell before a cult performs a ritual that could reshape the modern world. What inspired the Five Ancient Elements series and the mythology behind it?
The inspiration for the dangerous, thrill ride across the globe to cheat death and unravel arcane riddles came from where the inspiration for such things usually comes from: children’s literature.
A decade or so ago, I was working on a serialized novel for middle readers that would eventually appear in a national Celtic dance magazine. The novel, The Irish Witch’s Dress, required that I research Celtic mythology, and in the process, I came upon an apocryphal history of Ireland written centuries ago entitled Lebor Gabala Erenn, which translates roughly into The Book of Invasions. One particular myth grabbed my attention, and I wondered whether I might use it as the core of a Dan Brown-style global thriller for an adult readership. The idea seems to have been a good move, as The Book of Invasion, the first chapter in the Five Ancient Elements series, earned a Kirkus Review Starred Review and spawned two additional titles.
Ricky carries five thousand years of trauma and survival. How did you approach writing a character with that kind of history?
Awkwardly. In my first draft, Ricky was a very different character. In fact, she wasn’t even “Ricky.” She was “Ciara,” which my beta readers suggested would be mispronounced by virtually everyone. (The correct pronunciation is KEE-ruh.) And in my first draft, Ricky had it all together: attractive, physically appealing, no baggage. It bothered me until I figured out I’d given her character no room for growth or need to grow. The “new” Ricky was broken in a variety of ways, but events force her to step outside the perverse comfort of her misery to confront people, puzzles, and danger that have an equal capacity to heal or destroy her.
The book raises questions about immortality and moral responsibility. Why were those themes important to you?
I think it’s a fascinating question. If you could live forever, would this change you for better or worse? Immortality can be regarded as a placeholder for any sort of absolute (or near absolute) power. How would you change if you suddenly won $100 billion? Became the supreme ruler of a country? Possessed the nuclear codes and the world’s funkiest, most secure fallout shelter? Our political dialogues often focus on power dynamics and whether shifting it in one direction or the other would be more or less moral. I’m a bit of an idealist, and so I’ve always enjoyed the notion of a mostly moral David standing up to a Goliath whose morality has been eroded by power.
Are there other mythological traditions or historical periods you would like to explore in future books?
In addition to the Celts, the mythology of Ancient Egypt has fascinated me, which one can appreciate after reading The Book of Invasions and the others in the Five Ancient Elements series. The connection? In Lebor Gabala Erenn, a woman from the Middle East supposedly fled to an uninhabited island in the north, which led to the settling of Ireland. I wouldn’t mind writing more about Ancient Egypt. But history of all sorts draws me like a magnet.
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Who is left to stand against evil?
The sorceress Cessair is dead. But her cruel mentor, Shendjw—the last king of Predynastic Egypt—lives, having been made immortal by the power of the five ancient elements. He has dispatched his enemies, and now, after thousands of years, he hungers to rule the modern world. Yet five words whispered in a tomb fifty centuries ago stand between him and the enslavement of humanity. Words whispered to a dying woman by a woman already dead. Words that lead to a mysterious library of the arcane.
And to a small town in the American heartland where doom is promised and the clock is ticking.
The Book of Unforgivable Sins is the final chapter in the Five Ancient Elements Series, in which Celtic myth and Egyptian mysticism collide in a battle to decide the fate of the world.
The Book of Unforgivable Sins
If you like stories that ask what “unforgivable” really means while still delivering car wrecks, library heists, and small-town apocalypses, you’ll enjoy this book. The Book of Unforgivable Sins throws an immortal woman who has spent five thousand years sealed in a tomb together with a stressed-out archaeology student, then sends them racing from Egypt to Dublin to Chicago and small-town Iowa to find a legendary volume and stop an ancient sorcerer’s followers from using a death ritual to wipe out entire populations. Ricky Crowe, still cursed with immortality after an earlier showdown over the Scroll of Life and Death, is freed from Shendjw’s hidden mastaba by Jabari, a young Egyptian American on his first big dig, and the two of them chase clues to Marsh’s Library in Dublin, where The Book of Unforgivable Sins holds a handwritten version of the ritual that can strip Shendjw of his power and potentially save the world.
This one is fast and loud and sometimes a little wild, and I enjoyed that vibe a lot. The opening in Tarkhan grabbed me straight away, with Jabari’s mixture of awe and petty academic misery, and the whole sequence of him sneaking back into the tomb, cracking the ghost door, and finding “the mummy” in the sarcophagus had that great horror-movie energy that made me grin and wince at the same time. Once Ricky enters the story, the tone shifts into this snarky, bruised, found-family thriller that really worked for me. Her voice is sharp and funny, and the banter with Jabari, Adams, Green, and the others kept scenes from getting too grim even as bodies turned to ash in places like Marksville. The book leans on exposition about the earlier adventure with Cessair and the Scroll, though. There are chunks where characters sit and explain the previous novel and the metaphysics of the ritual, and every so often, that slowed the pace for me, even if the information was needed.
What I enjoyed was the mix of big ideas under all the chases and shootouts. The story keeps coming back to what immortality really costs and what people will do when they believe their cause is holy enough to excuse anything. Ricky’s five thousand years in the dark is not treated like a cool superpower; it feels like trauma and boredom and madness and survivor’s guilt, and the book is pretty blunt about how that messes with her. In the end, there is justice, a kind that left me uncomfortable in a good way, and I liked that the novel lets that sit instead of pretending it is simple.
By the time I turned the last page, I felt like I had gone through a whole season of a dark, pulpy TV show with these characters. The prose is straightforward and punchy, the jokes land more often than not, and the set pieces feel cinematic, even when the plot occasionally sprawls, and the mythology gets dense. I would happily recommend The Book of Unforgivable Sins to readers who enjoy contemporary fantasy thrillers with ancient magic, cults, and a bit of gallows humor.
Pages: 321 | ASIN : B0GQ6R7BD4
