Product Description

There’s no rest for the weary treasure hunter, but that’s how Indiana Jones likes it. Fresh from spying for the Allies in the thick of World War II Germany, the globe-trotting archaeologist doesn’t need much persuading to join his cohort “Mac” McHale in searching for one of the most coveted of artifacts: the fabled black pearl known as the Heart of Darkness. But the partners in adventure are not alone on their foray into the mysterious jungles of Haiti. German and Japanese agents are in hot pursuit, determined to possess the ebony artifact–and its secrets–for their own sinister purposes. And shadowing them all is an infamous voodoo priest, with powers of both diabolical science and black magic at his command.

On a treacherous odyssey across the Island of the Dead, where the legend of the zombi looms large, spiders, snakes, and booby traps will prove the least of Indy’s challenges. And capturing the prize will be child’s play compared to confronting an enemy unlike any other, whose numbers are legion and nearly impossible to kill–because they’re already dead. . . .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78415 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-29
• Released on: 2009-09-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345506986
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Steve Perry wrote for Batman: Ther Wars: Shadows of the Empire, and wrote the bestselling novelization of the blockb Animated Series during its first Emmy Award-winning season, authored the New York Times bestsellers Star Wars: Death Star (with Michael Reaves) and Stauster movie Men in Black. Perry has sold dozens of stories to magazines and anthologies, and has published a considerable number of novels, animated teleplays, nonfiction articles, reviews, and essays. He is currently the science fiction, fantasy, and horror book reviewer for The Oregonian.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One


In the Air over the Windward Passage, 
Eight Miles West of Haiti 
Summer 1943 

Indy hated small airplanes.

 Yes, yes, planes were necessary evils, he knew. If there was going to be a race to collect an ancient trea sure in the modern world of 1943, the winner wasn’t going to be the guy who sailed ’round the Horn on a clipper ship to find it. Flying was a sharp knife in any field archaeologist’s tool chest— but because planes were necessary didn’t mean he had to like the blasted things. Or trust them. Oh, sure, mostly they flew just fine. Sometimes they didn’t. After the third or fourth time one came down hard enough to blow out the tires or break the undercarriage, he was less trusting. Yeah, you did what you had to do to get where you needed to get. Someday your number was going to be up no matter what you did. No point in worrying about it too much, but . . . flying around like a bird? 

Because of his OSS training, Indy knew more about aircraft than he wanted to know, and this one— a Taylor/Piper J-2 that looked a lot older than it could possibly be— seemed to be held together with baling wire and prayer. It was noisy, underpowered— a forty- horsepower engine was stock, it weighed a little over 500 pounds empty, and with Mac, who had to go 210, and Indy at about 190? That was the maximum cargo capacity right there. Raul, the little Cuban pi lot, was small, but even he had to go 140, and that didn’t count the weight of the fuel and what luggage they had, and all that meant this plane ought not to be able to get off the ground. Yet here they were, cruising two thousand feet above the Ca rib be an, at all of sixty miles an hour. Yeah, Raul said he had rebuilt the engine and perked it up a fair bit, but even so, that it had taken off three times with them so far? That was still amazing— They say that bad thoughts draw the dev il’s attention. The engine sputtered, was silent for what seemed like a thousand years but was probably only a second, and Indy’s belly roiled as if it contained a most unhappy lizard trying to get out. The imaginary creature wasn’t too choosy about its exit route, trying to go up and down at the same time . . . 

Indiana Jones said a word that would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap in polite family circles. Mac laughed. 

The pi lot said something in rapid Cuban Spanish, and he laughed, too. 

“He said—” Mac began. 

“I heard him,” Indy said. “I’m sitting right here, third guy in a two- seater, and since I know there is no aerodynamic way this thing can stay up, he better have an in with the Virgin Mary.” 

“You worry too much.” 

“And you don’t worry enough.” 

Mac—George McHale— was British to the core, and MI6. He and Indy had been paired on a dozen secret assignments for either His Majesty’s government or Uncle Sam, mostly in Eu rope, a couple in the Pacific, and while Mac was a good man to have covering your back, he was also prone to recklessness. Indy had saved Mac’s bacon more often than the other way around, though he did have Mac to thank for keeping him alive a few times— and his recent increase in rank. That latter was a mixed blessing. Indy hadn’t even wanted to be in one army, much less two of them, and he had just gotten used to being “Major Jones” in one of them, and now he was a light colonel. 

Well. In an odd, technical sort of way he was a colonel . . . 

The engine coughed again. 

This time, Indy managed to keep from cursing. In Spanish, Raul said, “Not far now, señors, only a couple of miles to the coast there.” 

Indy had to lean to his right to see through the windshield, and the act of doing so caused the little plane to bank. 

He didn’t say anything, but Raul must have noticed how quickly he leaned back the other way. 

Raul—or maybe it was Indy— straightened the plane out. “Rosita is very sensitive, señor.” 

Sensitive? A plane that you could turn by leaning? Indy shook his head. At least they had made it this far. They had taken off from Santiago, Cuba, flying to Guantanamo, then to a landing strip hacked out of a sugarcane field outside Baraco. They had refueled and then started over the Windward Passage, the strait that connected the Atlantic and the Ca rib be an, heading toward Mole Saint- Nicolas in Haiti. There was supposedly a runway and a fuel tank there at which they could gas up for the hop into Saint- Marc, and yet another fuel stop, before the final leg to Port- au- Prince. Maybe somebody would want to see a passport or visa, but Raul didn’t think it likely. The war and all, who had time to stand around waiting because a plane might land? 

The J-2 had a range of only a couple of hundred miles, but it was what Mac had found. The “war and all” had sucked up a lot of available aircraft, along, apparently, with border patrolmen. 

Indy looked at Mac. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this. We need the rest. It’s why they gave us the furlough.” 

Mac smiled. “Because, Jonesy, you are a dedicated archaeologist, right? How could you pass up a chance like this? What if the Nazis or the Japa nese got there first? Then that bloody giant black pearl would be buying jackboots for Adolf or maybe a sub for the emperor.” Indy didn’t want to say it but couldn’t stop himself: “Haiti is tropical. Crawling with snakes.” 

“Actually, old chum, they aren’t any of them poisonous in these parts, you know.” 

“Well, yippee for that. It’s not the poison, Mac, it’s the . . . snakiness.” 
Mac laughed again. 

“You wouldn’t think it so funny if it was rats,” Indy allowed. 

Mac’s smile disappeared. “Bloody Germans!” 

Gotcha, Indy thought. Mac was like Indy’s father— he hated rodents. He felt pretty good about that comeback. That thing with the rats in the Nazi castle— 

The plane’s little engine went sput- sput- sput! and died. 

It got very quiet. 

The engine didn’t come back on. 

The plane started to drop. 

Raul began praying to the Virgin Mary. 

Laden as the craft was, the glide pattern suddenly seemed more like that of a brick than a plane. 

Indy tightened the tie holding his whip onto his belt, made sure his Webley’s holster was snapped shut. “Where’s my hat?” he said, looking around— 

The sea, which had been a comfortable two thousand feet below, rushed toward them. It was only a hundred yards or so away now and coming up fast. They were, if they were lucky, going to ditch. If not, they’d go straight in and blow apart on impact. 

“If I die and you don’t, I’m coming back to haunt you, Mac.” 

He braced himself. 

The plane hit the water— 

The jolt clacked Indy’s teeth together as his body snapped forward against the seat belt. The plane skipped once, like a rubber ball bouncing off concrete. The right wing tore loose, the pi lot’s door ripped away, and Indy saw the windshield shatter as Raul’s belt broke and his head went through the glass. 

They bounced and jostled over the water like a skipped stone, hard enough to break up more of the plane— 

Finally, they stopped moving foward. The water rushed in, filling the little craft, which began to sink. “Out!” Indy yelled. 

Mac was already moving. 

Customer Reviews

Indiana Jones fights zombis and...FAIL
The easiest way to determine if this is a book you might be interested in reading is to ask yourself this:

Did you enjoy Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?

Are you interested in reading this because it's Indiana Jones, or are you simply looking for an adventure story?

Indiana Jones. Zombis. Sounds great, right? Sadly, no.

I will be straightforward with my biases. As far as the films go, I despised Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not only was the story profoundly unsatisfying, it focused far too much on peripheral Indy characters (I'm guessing if Indiana Jones had his own version of Entourage, it would look like KotCS).

That said, this book is an inferior story to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I certainly mean no disrespect to the author, Steve Perry, and I admit I have never read his other work, but as an Indiana Jones novel, this fails on multiple accounts.

1. You could easily substitute some other name for Indiana Jones (and a few cliched references to adventures past), and you wouldn't notice the difference.

2. While it might make a decent, general adventure story, it doesn't follow the tried and true formula for a good Indiana Jones story - the initial adventure the viewer/reader sees the tail end of which is not or little related to the rest of the story, the reveal of the MacGuffin, the globe-trotting to exotic locations and piecing of clues, the unusual and intense action scenes, and the big finale. Similar to KotCS (and also largely Temple of Doom), this breaks from the Indy Formula and focuses on simply one linear story in one locale. The sense of adventure definitely hurts as a result.

3. There is far too much focus on the villains and peripheral characters. Every two to three pages followed the same pattern of: Indy & Mac, the German team, the Japanese team, the Haitian bokor (wizard/priest). The constant break in narrative was quickly tiresome. While we gained unique insight into the villains, their thoughts, and even felt sympathy for them (like learning Yamada's family lived in Nagasaki, which we all know had the bomb dropped on it shortly after the events of this book), an Indiana Jones novel is not the place for such lofty aspirations in exposition. It works far better to follow Indy through the adventure, learning the twists and turns as he does.

4. This is an annoying Indiana Jones. Whereas KotCS made him more professorial (i.e. annoying) in explaining things at awkward moments, this book takes it to new heights. And it was particularly grating to keep reading Indy think about how he'll have to get his fedora fixed. We all know that the chances his hat survived all these adventures in one piece is ridiculous, but do we really need the mechanics of how he has a hat guy and how much it costs him? The nonchalant, cool Indy of Raiders and Last Crusade is conspicuously absent.

5. This is probably more a criticism of Lucas, but the Mac character found here and in KotCS is a flimsy, one-dimensional character.

So, while Steve Perry clearly has a decent understanding of Haitian pagan religious practices and Japanese culture (and actually you learn a few interesting tidbits as a result), it just doesn't work for a novel like this.

This book should be a very quick and entertaining read. Instead, I found myself laboring to finish it. Not once, did the Raiders March ever pop into my head. If you want that kind of experience, you would be better off reading the earlier Rob MacGregor books or Max McCoy.

Everything a Great Indiana Jones adventure shouldn't be
This book makes Martin Caidin's Indiana Jones novels feel like masterpieces. Indiana seems a secondary character in his own book. There was nothing even remotely characteristic about him. Steve Perry writes Indiana Jones as cautious and scared. The action was missing. There are so many characters coming and going that I couldn't keep track of who was who. I was EXTREMELY frustrated reading this book. I couldn't allow any of my friends and family to share in the heartache of this book so it's been thrown away. I would have given it a zero if I could.

If your desperate, maybe, otherwise read Indiana's other adventures
Two and a half stars. I have to agree with some of the other reviewers here. I also have read the Indiana Jones novels by Rob Macgregor and the ones by Max McCoy (skipping the two by Martin Caidin). Those books were really very good. I really loved those. I had hoped that with a big named author like Steve Perry writing, that this new book, "Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead", would be another great Indy tale in the long line of tales out there. It's passable, but not all together that "indiana Jones-ish" if you take my meaning. I mean, if the main character wasn't called Indy, it would be just another adventure yarn. There is some atmosphere here and there, and a few moments if your a fan of Indy and just want to see him get wrapped up in something. But honestly, a lot of the writing here just seems like filler. Don't get me wrong. Its well written and all, but the adventure itself is slow going. This is not a fun, adventurous crazy train ride of a story. Its a trek with a lot of information in it, and a lot of concentration on other characters aside from Indy himself. When Indy does come into play, there is not a whole lot of Indy's famous character here, just bits and pieces. I think I see what Steve Perry was going for in the book, a dark trek on an miserable island in the rainy jungle with Zombies, etc. I see the potential. But on paper, it came out only sort of so so.

I hope Steve Perry will try again, or someone else will.