In the Courts of the Sun

By Brian D'Amato

Jed is a Maya who had to flee his homeland to avoid persecution by the repressive government. His parents were murdered and his early life was so traumatic that it affected his personality adversely, making him a little backward when it comes to personal relationships. But offsetting this backwardness is his intuitive understanding of games and game theory which he has used to create a system that enables him to beat the market in commodities and thereby make millions. The game he uses to give him the competitive advantage is an ancient Maya game taught to him by his mom called the Sacrifice Game. It's a form of divination to look at the future.
An old Maya book has been found and in it are details of events that it accurately predicted, using the Sacrifice Game. The final event of the book is the end of the world in December 2012. The people who found and translated the book are afraid its prediction of the end of the world will come true and they decide they have to do whatever it takes to stop it. They need to know how to play the Sacrifice Game better in order to look at what will cause the end of the world. Jed is an expert Sacrifice Game player but as good as he is he knows that he doesn't have the expertise of the ancient Maya.
The scientists need to travel into the past to find out how to play the Sacrifice Game better, but time travel is impossible. Still, they have figured out a technique that basically beams a human's consciousness back in time into the brain of a living person in the past. Since Jed is an expert at the Sacrifice Game and since he is eager to go back for his own personal reasons he gets chosen to be piped back in time to 664 CE.
But when his consciousness arrives there it turns out it entered the wrong person. It was supposed to enter the Maya ruler's brain. Instead it entered the brain of a stand-in for the ruler who is scheduled to shortly die in some kind of religious ritual. How can Jed find out what he needs to know if the body he is in will soon be dead?

This is a huge book, almost 900 hundred pages long. It goes into endless detail, especially concerning the Mayans and their civilization. There are also gruesome torture scenes described in minute detail which are pretty disgusting. Most of the book centers around Jed in the past in his struggles to simply survive and also to fulfill his mission. It goes on and on and I simply got fed up. One description of a Maya city goes on for pages and pages. I don't need or want that much information. Sure, the descriptions of Maya society are fascinating to a point. But after awhile, I stopped caring. In fact, I just skimmed the last third of the book, just wanting to get it over with. Then when I get to the end, it says, "End of Book 1." Yikes! Book 1 was plenty too much for me. I can't see myself reading Book 2, unless the author finds himself an editor who has a cure for word diarrhea, something many authors today suffer from. Seems like any more editors are afraid to edit!