When your mind is busy with facts, dates and titles, the only thing you feel like reading is something that will let your mind wander without missing a bit of what't happening in the pages. The Wheel of Darkness is such a book, a story you can read without effort, a real page turner that won't let you put it down until you have finished it, but that won't let much of a trace on your mind when you're done with it. Exactly what I needed right now.
FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast has taken his ward, Constance Greene, to a secluded oriental monastery so she can recover from the horrible experience of the murder of Diogenes Pendergast, Aloysius' evil brother, who seduced her and got her pregnant before she realized that his only intentions were to hurt his older brother. But not all is peace and quiet in the monastery, for someone has stolen the Agozyen, an evil object whose aim is to cleanse the world of its most dangerous burden: human kind. Pendergast will have to recover it from a murderer who is hiding in a luxury ocean-liner, only to discover that he is not inmune to the dangers of the mysterious object hidden in the Agozyen box.
Agent Pendergast is the most interesting character Preston and Child have been able to create in their more than half a dozen novels together. He grows more interesting as the novels advance, giving the impression that his creators didn't have a clear idea of how they wanted him to be in the first couple of books. Highly intelligent, cool, always resourceful, he is as unbelievable as the perfect James Bond, but there's something about him that attracts readers and makes us want to know more about this man and his story.
Worthy read if you like thrillers with a touch of sci-fi, although maybe not as brilliant as The Cabinet of Curiosities, where we are introduced to the Pendergast family secrets and begin to know this man a little more. I would advice you to read at least this book before you embark yourself in the Pendergast universe, or it will be difficult for you to understand a few concepts in this last novel. Open your mind to impossible things, to people who look to be twenty-something when their actually a few hundred years old, to misty bodies of smoke who will take away your soul if you are not strong enough... A nice way to spend away an afternoon, if you don't expect deep insights.
