Tartting up Rick Riordan and Castle

The Immortals strikes me as a combination of Castle and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

I liked Castle until the romance ruined it. In The Immortals, there’s a relationship developing between Selene (aka Artemis) and Classics professor Theo, but it’s not quite clear until towards the end what exactly it’s turning into. Selene is an avenger of wrongs against women in modern day Manhattan as an unlicensed private investigator, and Theo is the academic rock star with a bit of a past who gets pulled into an investigation when a colleague and former lover of his is murdered in a very unusual way.

The ensuing investigation is where things get like Tartt’s novel. I have to admit I hated it; it’s beautifully written but the characters are so totally unlikable, and it suggests that all Classics students and professors end up tragically like the ones in the story. But that’s another review. That’s what’s cool about The Immortals; it gets a similar level of historical information about ancient Greek mystery cults (specifically the Eleusinian Mysteries) but makes them a part of the story in a way that’s still dark but also has characters willing to fight for both the historic culture and the evildoing.

On another level, there’s a hint of Percy Jackson here too, but for adults. The classical Greek deities are still around and get people involved in adventures, but here the deities are struggling with becoming more mortal and human-like (mostly). There is of course some creative adaptations or at least extrapolations concerning the actual procedures though, as Theo points out the mysteries were so called for a reason and the secrets remain unknown in their details. Some of the gods of course know {minor spoiler ahead}; Dionysus (who has a rather funny link to Theo) tells Selene that the Mysteries used to involved human sacrifice in order to give the cultists immortality, but when the gods took that part out, civilization developed as a result of people being forced to improve their lives on their own. But what happens if a fading god or human finds out about the chance for immortality through ritual? Serial killing, apparently.

I’m still nor totally sure what Theo and Selene end up seeing in each other, since they do sort of become a couple by the end. I don’t see this as spoiler as it’s totally conventional in this kind of story, and since Artemis was/is a virgin goddess, I’m wondering how that’s going to turn out. If this were Castle, they admit they like each other and spend a while flirting, then finally give in and start dating, but then Artemis would be giving up her virginity, and as she herself points out, that would mean giving up her divinity since being a virgin is one of her defining attributes. On Theo’s part, he doesn’t seem to be very good with relationships with women. His last relationship went bad, and worse in some ways then he may have guessed at the time, and Selene is a vengeful goddess who doesn’t seem to have much of a soft side, especially when it comes to men. This isn’t so much a complaint as it is an uncertainty. Depending on where it goes, this may or may not make/break the series for me.

The one complaint I do have is that sometimes the story starts to drag when Selene or Theo or both gets stuck in a bout of self-pity/loathing. So 3.75 stars.