Top-flight soft-horror novel by Miami-based columnist Due (The
Between, 1995). Some 500 years ago, young Dawit of Lalibela, in
Abyssinia, was inducted into the 52-member group called The
Immortals by the master Khaldun, who had drunk the blood of Christ.
Still looking 30, Dawit (now known as David) lives in Miami, his
Khaldun-transfused blood so filled with T-cells that no disease or
injury can kill him. He is, for all practical purposes, immortal.
He's had many careers. He's also had many lovers, wives, and
children, and watched age overtake them while he remained young.
Today, his daughter Rosalie, from a liaison in New Orleans in the
1920s, lies infirm in a Chicago nursing home. David stops off to
administer euthanasia. Then he returns to Jessica, his wife of six
years, a Miami reporter who's just started research on a book about
disgraceful conditions in nursing homes. The Immortals think
themselves above humans, so when David feels threatened by
Jessica's research he kills her fellow researcher, Peter. Although
he's killed before to protect his identity, his love of Jessica
makes him feel, for the first time, guilty for what he's done.
David realizes that he doesn't, for once, want to outlive and, to
protect his secret, abandon his human family. Will Jessica discover
that her husband's immortal? Will he give his blood to her and
their five-year-old daughter, Kira, so that they can always be with
him? Suspense tightens neatly with modest melodrama but with a big
sense of family life. Due is careful to portray David as both hero
(he's charming and talented, polylingual, and a published author)
and threat. He is, essentially, an alien trying to mimic a life
that can never really be his. A sequel seems likely, though it may
be hard to keep up the gripping originality here. (Kirkus Reviews)
When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever.
Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans.
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