Please recommend best book to start by James Rollins and / or Arturo Pérez-Reverte.
Pérez-Reverte has novels in several genres (most of them with a heavy dose of either adventure or ‘sleuth’ work), as well as one series and several colections of articles, which may not be available in English. I’d recommend starting with one of the stand-alone books. I’m asuming you can’t read Spanish - several of my favorite books of his aren’t translated yet.
For a contemporary setting: The Queen of the South is a noir novel. Technology in The Seville Communion is dated, but it’s the only book I’ve read where IT is important and well-described despite having been written by a non-IT person.
For a historical setting, very relevant to the current date: Cabo Trafalgar (if you like your naval battles).
For Perez-Reverte, I’d recommend The Flanders Panel and for Rollins you could try either my favourite, Ice Hunt or maybe Sandstorm because it’s the beginning of his Sigma Force series.
I tend to think his earlier books are better than his later ones - The Devil Colony (his latest) was way OTT!
I like Reverte’s “The Dumas Club” which was adapted for the movie “The 9th Gate”.
Agreed, I’m another fan of The Dumas Club - a good investigation story with a dark supernatural mystery lurking underneath.
I love both The Dumas Club and The Flanders Panel. In the latter, a painting was described so well I felt that I was actually inside the painting, and I generally don’t visualize much when I read.
Another vote for The Club Dumas (as the copy I have is called). As far as I can remember, it’s the only one of his books with a supernatural element and it’s done very well. The Flanders Panel and The Seville Communion are also good suggestions and both are standard whodunit-type mysteries, if that’s more to your taste.
I’ve read most of his stuff and there’s very little I wouldn’t recommend. The Painter of Battles didn’t do much for me and the last couple of books in the Captain Alatriste series weren’t as good as the earlier ones, but the rest of his stuff is excellent. The Fencing Master and The Nautical Chart are a couple of other really good ones.
Thanks for the correction - it is The Club Dumas in the English translation (Random House, trans. by Soto) that I own.
I think I was mixing that title up with Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club, another investigation with literary background novel. (And which I would not recommend, BTW.)
I’ll second Meurglys and say for Rollins go with either Ice Hunt or Sandstorm. Sandstorm is his first “Sigma Force” novel, which is an interesting concept in itself. (Sigma Force is the covert operations branch of DARPA; everyone in it is a Special Forces operative with a PhD in science.) I actually liked Map of Bones best of the series but you probably shouldn’t start with that.
The problem (which admittedly a lot of ongoing series have) is that he has to keep upping the stakes in each novel and things are getting pretty ludicrous. Plus, despite what he claims in his appendixes, some of the “science” in his books is dubious at best. Still fun reads though.
I agree about The Painter of Battles and I suppose The Flanders Panel could be described as a standard whodunit, but I loved the way the historical clues, etc. were teased out.
I thought The Nautical Chart was a bit slow, but I did enjoy it when I read it a couple of years ago… I said a bit about it here (massive spoilers).
And here’s a little about the latest Rollins book, too. As I said, I prefer his earlier books.
I can see your point, but The Nautical Chart hit a certain literary sweet spot for me. Sunken ships, a femme fatale, a protagonist who almost an anti-hero; the whole thing is very noir in a Hammett/Chandler kind of way. A lot of APR’s books have a bot of that element to them, but that one more than the others.