Havock Junction

Joe Donnelly

This is the second Joe Donnelly book I have read, and I am starting to think he has a thing for crazy roads, there was a short section in Bane (first one of his books I read) where people were driving around in circles, and there is a lot of that going on in this book. The main gist of this story is that it is the roadtrip from hell.

This book was a little hard to read at the start, the type setting was a bit odd, it was like it was a diferent font to the commonly used ones, or the spacing was a bit strange, not to sure exactly what it was but I found that I kept losing my place on the page. Once I got used to it the words started to flow better.

I have made a discovery, gold writing on books dosen't show up too well when scanned as can be seen on the cover scan above. I like the fonts used on this covers letterning, the artwork is a bit lame though.

The story goes something like this:
A band of gypsys and assorted travelling folk roll into town to perform a ritual on a certain night. The main characters husband gets seduced by one of the gypsys who turns out to be a witch, he leaves town when the gypsys do. Some time down the track he comes back and takes the two children, who are going to be used in the final of a series of rituals as a form of sacrifice.

Our heroine "Patsy" gets in contact with her brother in law, an ex-military man to help her track down the children and rescu them, eventually they locate the kids, it turns out the witch and her new consort have taken controll of a cult based at the location for the final ritual and are going to perform said ritual in four days time.
Patsy's brother in law "Carrick" assembles a team to go in and rescue the children, in the process of escaping the witch curses Patsy to travel on the "Ley roads" and this is where patsy and the children find them selves in no time flat on the Highway to Hell.

The first bit is mostly seen as flashbacks explaining how they got onto the road, and probably about half the book is boring repetition of them driving around in circles coming back to the same intersection or landmark. They really make no progress through the middle part of the book, the occasional interesting thing happens like the catseyes on the road coming to life and attacking them or a trip through a car graveyard, but for the most part is frustrating to read possibly a bit of extra editing would have been good.

The turning point in the novel, where it actually starts to get interesting is when they meet a stranger on the side of the road that they team up with.

Although the middle part of the book was tedious to read, the excitement and tension of that last 150 odd pages made up for it and I was glad I stuck through the first part to get to it.