Brothers Macbeth and Drederick Tooms should have it made as fair-haired scions of an impossibly rich and powerful family of industrialists. Alas, life is complicated in mid-1950s USA when you're child heirs to the throne of Sword Enterprises, a corporation that has enshrined Machiavelli's The Prince as its operating manual and whose patriarch believes, Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, would be a swell company logo.
Consider also those long, cruel winters at the Mountain Leopard boarding school for assassins in the Himalayas, or that Dad may be a supervillain, while an uncle occasionally slaughters his nephews and nieces for sport; and the space flight research division of Sword Enterprises "accidentally" sent a probe through a wormhole into outer darkness and contacted an alien god. Now a bloodthirsty cult and an equally vicious rival firm suspect the Tooms boys know something and will spare no expense, nor innocent life, to get their claws on them.
Between the machinations of the disciples of black gods and good old corporate skulduggery, it's winding up to be a hell of a summer vacation for the lads.
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The boy awakened in the night, although he had cultivated sufficient wariness to not move a muscle beneath the leopard - and yak-hide blankets. THE WHITE DEVIL
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(@journalstonepub, 11 December 2015, ebook, 94 pages, bought from @AmazonKindle, # popsugarreadingchallenge, a book whose title starts with "Q," "X," or "Z")
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I must have read a different book, judging by all the positive reviews on GoodReads. X's for Eyes just didn't work for me. I found it a very strange read. I struggled to get into the book for the first few chapters written as a Hardy Boys type adventure because it didn't make much sense and I didn't really understand what was going on and where the book was going. By the time things started to come together I'd lost most of my interest in the book. Thankfully, it's a short read. To me, this was too much of a confusing mish-mash of different things.
