Review | Entertainment Weekly Hot List
"An intelligently written Da Vinci Code ....A taut suspense thriller about a gifted girl and the ancient cult that wants to use her mental abilities for its own sketchy ends."
Review | Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"It’s hard to imagine that a novelist could lift such elements from several of the best-known best sellers of recent years and turn them into something original and gripping, but that’s exactly what Mr. Guilfoile has done in The Thousand....(T)he book is jet-fueled by its author’s unerring sense of character and his nimble, fleet-footed prose. Just as he remade the Frankenstein myth in his first novel, Cast of Shadows, so he manages to take a handful of well-trodden concepts here and refashion them into a suspenseful summer read that’s all his own....(T)he real pleasures of reading The Thousand have less to do with the story’s portentously withheld secrets than with Mr. Guilfoile’s keenly observed characters, his gritty feel for the city of Chicago and his ability to weave artfully all sorts of philosophical questions — like the relationship of music and math, and the morality of using scientific knowledge — into his hectic, bloodstained plot."
Where I'll Be
On Tuesday, August 31 at 7PM I'll be appearing at the Mystery One Bookshop in Milwaukee. For a full list of signings and appearances, check The Thousand tour schedule.
Review | Rick Kogan, WGN Radio
"The Thousand is thrilling, intellectually stimulating, and has some of the most vivid characters in contemporary literature."
Review | Jeff Johnson, Chicago Sun-Times
"The Thousand, which involves Pythagoras, Mozart’s Requiem Mass, and intuitive art, shows Guilfoile’s in-depth knowledge of music, mathematics, history, pop culture and philosophy. Set in Chicago and Las Vegas, the new novel has every vivid detail down pat when it comes to the sights, smells and particularly the attitudes of the two cities."
Review | Doug Childers, American Chronicle
"(Reading The Thousand) is like riding a roller coaster blindfolded: You can never anticipate the book's next hairpin turn, and it has enough steep drops to keep the adrenaline pumping."
Review | Robert Duffer, Time Out Chicago
"As much as Chicagoan Kevin Guilfoile loves his city, he sets it on fire in his latest thriller, The Thousand...Comparisons to The Da Vinci Code are understandable, but The Thousand is less about the secret or the secret society than the dozen characters ensnared by it, characters strung out between the pursuit of power and self-preservation."
How It Begins
An excerpt from The Thousand is now available at Scribd.
Review | Ruth Jordan, Crimespree Magazine
"Kevin Guilfoile's Cast of Shadows was one of the most impressive debuts of the last decade. Then came the wait. Now comes The Thousand....It’s Guilfoile’s amazing ability to juggle history, art and numbers into non-stop suspense that demand this book be read. The Thousand encompasses all the best of crime fiction––court room scenes worthy of Turow, a heroine who’s a young V.I. on steroids. His cop reads like McBain and the Grimms couldn’t have come up with a better 'mother.' Into it all he places the storytelling of Eco mixed with O’Brien....Guilfoile may have made us wait for book two but he was inspired by the perfect music that propels The Thousand to create a novel made up of many parts and reaching for the stars of immortality. Damned him, he succeeded."
The Millions Summer Book Preview
"While many readers might associate Guilfoile with McSweeney’s, where he’s a frequent contributor, or The Morning News, where with John Warner he provides essential commentary for the Tournament of Books, his fiction occupies a space that some readers might not associate with these latter-day literary tastemakers. Case in point, the titular Thousand are “a clandestine group of powerful individuals safeguarding and exploiting the secret teachings of Pythagoras.” That may sound like Dan Brown fodder, but you’ll be getting something much, much smarter."
Previous Posts
Unless otherwise indicated, all posts here are by Kevin Guifoile with occasional contributions
by Jim Coudal (JC) of Coudal Partners, who created this site. A listing of Kevin's
scheduled appearances and readings
can be found here.
ISBN: 1-4000-4308-5
Available for pre-order pretty much everywhere.
Amazon
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Books-a-Million
Powell's
Indiebound.
Borders.
