This makes twice in the last six months that I was disappointed by books with an incredible concept that were truncated by the prose and demands of mid-list popular fiction, Book of Secrets and the Thirteen Hallows and both instances made me long for the book that could and should have been.Books with a manuscript or artifact purporting to reveal the secret history or mankind need a genre name all of their own. Chris Roberson adds to this genre in what could have been a very interesting way with pulp fiction inserts, family drama, an examination of myth as allegory and allegory as myth, but instead of being the blockbuster that raised this as yet unnnamed genre to literature, which I truly believe this book had the potential to do, the author was bound by the restraints of pulp fiction and that is a shame. The group or groups that ultimately turned out to be the antagonists were introduced only in the last fifty pages and read like deus ex machina and the overall development was choppy and this is sad because like all Angry Robot writers, Roberson is a smart, well-read guy with the ability to put a lot of ideas into sophisticated popular fiction. I so wish that this book could have been twice as long and twice as developed because it deserved that. In an afterword, Roberson writes that he has played with the idea for this book for twenty years - oh how I wish he had left it in the drawer for six months and then did a re-write on it adding all of the complexity he so clearly wanted.So, instead of a stunning work of popular fiction, Roberson gives us a very fun beach read. And the book is a very fun and fast read, but seeing the potential that was lost is disappointing. Chuck Wendig put a lot of complex ideas into Blackbird and Mockingbird in a short-handed form too, but his truncating of complex ideas and motifs seemed to work better. Read Book of Secrets for fun, but realize that it has signifigant flaws in execution if not in concept. Check out other Roberson titles and the very interesting books over at Angry Robot.