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Let’s be honest: you read this book for the crimes, and the crimes, dear reader, are pretty great. Exotic, high energy, yet methodical. If you loved the movie you might like this. The writing is clunky at times and the primary villain seems almost unnaturally lucky. The context and backstory for the original film characters are well crafted. The love stories kinda work but not really, imho.

My number one gripe is this: the right medium for this story is visual, not textual. The book is filled with specific positions and layouts and scene blocking that refer to very specific spatial positions and visualizing them to understand the flow can feel very clumsy. It’s the old “dancing about architecture” problem. I guess he just realized the actors were too old and a direct prequel wasn’t realistic, so he tried to do the next best thing. I’m glad I read it. I won’t be re-reading.

Great concept, deep historical backing, but way too much random detail and academic patina that should have been scraped off before shipping this to print.

Imagine one hundred more passages like this one:

“Jefferson showed that he was aware of the danger, when he noted that the “wholesome” “party divisions of whig and tory” served to “keep out those of a more dangerous character.” His famous “firebell in the night” remark, then, wherein he warned that “a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated,” was as much, if not more, a reiteration of his opposition to placing the slave question on the national agenda as it was a meditation on the immorality of slavery.”

Or this:

“Binns arrived in Baltimore, then a major port for southeastern Pennsylvania, on September 1, 1801, after a sea voyage of nine weeks. Kept away from the city by reports of yellow fever, the passengers stopped at a hotel a mile out of town. Binns later recalled, “What with bull-frogs, common frogs, tidetids, etc. etc., and negro huts, in which there was much shouting, screaming, and clapping of hands, my ears never before had been assailed by such a multitude of confused, unusual, and unmusical sounds.… At the hotel where we stopped, for the first time I ate cakes made of that delicious vegetable, Indian corn.” The next day, he set off on foot, accompanied by three wagons loaded with supplies he had brought with him. On his arrival in Harrisburg he hired a boat to carry him and his supplies to Northumberland, a lively commercial town on the Susquehanna River”

Editors are great things. I was not up to the task on this one, regrettably.