Sons of the Morning - Softcover

Copp, Dewitt S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393335224 ISBN 13: 9780393335224

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992

Synopsis

Sons of the Morning is Dewitt Copp's most complex and fascinating novel to date. Fifty years ago, a team of scientists hunting fossils camped out by a Canadian wilderness lake. They vanished, leaving only remains of the camp and the diary of their leader, Dowd, with its strange, indecipherable diagram.

In subsequent years Dowd's mysterious document drew the hunters: Montour, the bush pilot, stole it, certain it would bring him the freedom he so fiercely sought. Jason, the British SOE agent on the run, killed for it, believing he had seen its duplicate in France. Von Werbel, the crazed German genius, plotted to use its markings to bring about mass destruction. The invidious Stanhope, of the Ashdom Foundation, kept the diary secret against the day it would make him famous. Now it is Dowd's haunted daughter, Kate, who flies to the deadly lake to find what Dowd's diary described as "a discovery like no other" and, in doing so, uncovers the real meaning of evil.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

The last notations of an explorer who vanished in darkest Canada pass from hand to hand, traveling from Quebec to Nazi Germany to the postwar US, making mischief wherever they go--in a WW II thriller by the author of A Matter Of Concealment (1989). A series of connected adventures begins and ends at a remote and spooky lake in northern Quebec, where a team of American explorers disappeared in the middle of their search for fossils. The French Indian flyer who took the team to the lake finds a notebook with references to ``gold'' and with a mysterious drawing in the last entries and then tries to discover what had excited the missing men. His search is interrupted by the war, which takes him and the notebook to England and flying duty over France, where the notebook passes first to a young Anglo-French spy and then to a German atomic scientist, each of whom has his own theory about the peculiar drawing and the cryptic notations. At the end of the war, the notebook comes back to the New York foundation that sponsored the original expedition and winds up in the hands of a pretentious young bureaucrat who thinks it will make his career. Amusing characters, hair-raising situations, and loads of period charm more than atone for plot coincidences and a faintly disappointing denouement. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Copp's ( A Matter of Concealment ) solid research fleshes out this fast-paced but strained historical adventure tinged with a suggestion of the supernatural. In 1939, French Canadian bush pilot Rene Montour realizes that the American fossil-hunting team he was to fly back from a bivouac in Quebec has drowned in a sudden storm on remote Lake Tissinabi. A timber wolf literally drops team head John Dowd's diary at Rene's feet; in it, Rene finds a curious diagram with a word he recognizes as "gold." Certain the team had discovered treasure, he pockets the diary and plans to return to Tissinabi, but WW II erupts and he is obliged to enter the Royal Canadian Air Force. When he is shot down in Europe, the diary changes hands, variously scrutinized by an Allied intelligence agent, the Gestapo (who think it's a code book), a German nuclear scientist, a Berlin madam, a conniving American foundation executive, the agent (again) and Dowd's own daughter--transfers effected by invoking more than one deus ex machina. The actual message from the diary, revealed on the last page, proves anticlimactic.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0393335224
• ISBN 13: 9780393335224
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256