I know these authors and their Pendergast series have some fans here.

They were about my top faves, so I grabbed their new book "Gideon's Sword," with a new character (named Gideon, of course).

WOW. This is one of the worst books I have ever read. It's almost unbelievable that these guys wrote it. The writing is bad, the plot is so basic and simple a grade-schooler would figure it out. The characters are boring. The dialogue is cartoon-ishly pompous.

How can authors with such a good track record do such a total reversal? I also looked at amazon reviews, and there were quite a few who agreed with me--but nobody has been able to figure it out.

I read it last month - thrilled when I saw it at the library - what a huge let-down. It was dreadful.

It had such potential to begin a new series but I can't imagine it going anywhere unless the second book redeems them. I call books like like "contract fulfillers" - like the author(s) had a contract for x-number of books in a given period of time and they had to write something.

Gail