Krishna
Kathy Reichs has a lot in common with the heroine of many of her novels – Temperance Brennan. Like Tempe (as the character is called), she is also a forensic pathologist (CSI Style) and was an archeologist before. She divides her time, like Tempe, between North Carolina and Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Another curious thing I found is when looking at the copyright of this book. (I was trying to see how recent the book is). The copyright is owned by Temperance Brannan L.S! (I do not know what L.S is, and I guess it is something like Inc. but even so, it is like giving copyrights to a Walt Disney movie to ‘Mickey Mouse Inc.’, is it not? Fascinating!)
Well, on to the story. The story could be explosive, and takes a theme related to the explosive centre core of the Da Vinci Code. Again, the hypothesis is that Jesus did not die on the cross and had a family too. Here it is fused into Jewish beliefs as well, because of the place and time when he is supposed to have died.
The story has explosive potential, and the start is phenomenal: I was hooked for the first 20 pages or so, where she pieces out an apparent suicide of Avram Ferris, a Jewish antique dealer. Then the story tanks and sinks to ridiculously low levels and stays there till the end.
The story telling sags, does not hold one’s interest, and is needlessly complex. (A lot of authors can learn a trick or two from Dan Brown and even Dean Koontz in keeping the tension alive on every page, even when they do not deliver fully, as they are sometimes wont to).
Not only does the plot does not hold the reader’s interest fully but in the whole plot midway through, but even the tense situations are ridiculous. Here is a sample:
Tempe and fellow investigator Jack go into a dark cave with only weak flashlights. Jack promises to stick by her, since he knows she has claustrophobia. He inexplicably disappears and we are led to believe that he is dead. She crawls around the space and just when the light gives out, notices a hungry, ravenous, apparently angry wolf. No weapons, right?
How does Kathy extricate Tempe from this predicament? Tempe “realizes that the wolf just wants to get out and that she is blocking the way” and gets out, having the wolf run away. Then Jack reappears! (He had “just gone to investigate some prowlers”. Well, in a horror movie, such nonsense can at least be frightening, but it has no place in a book, in my view.)
There is more: Immediately, they are besieged by angry fanatical mob that wants to tear them from limb to limb for desecrating their holy site by prowling around. They even hit Jack with a stone, causing profuse bleeding. How do they escape? They get out right in the midst of the crowd and “calmly walk out”. Give me a break…
Oh yes, I promised something about the story. Avram Ferris is killed by persons unknown and Tempe and Jack (and Ryan, a fellow detective and romantic interest of Tempe rolled into one) uncover a full skeleton that leads them to believe that they may have found the very skeleton of Jesus. However, the carbon dating proves that it could not be, since the age does not match.
They leave to investigate in Israel, only to have the skeleton lost to an orthodox mob. In their cave prowlings (mentioned above) Tempe discovers another skeleton with pieces of shroud on a figure that “may have been crucified at one time”.
The story loops back and ties the death of Ferris to the potentially explosive developments here, and meanders around multiple ruminations of the same set of facts, and a James Bond like long discourse with the bad woman holding a gun at Tempe.
I was underwhelmed overall and can give it a 3/10, at best.
— Krishna