Indiana Jones and the Templar of Dumb?
Amazon says:
Barnes & Noble think:
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Author: Steve Berry
Title: The Templar Legacy Genre: thriller I saw just a few days ago that the winner of the annual Pillsbury Bakeoff had been announced. It seems significant to me that at the same time, I was in the process of struggling through Steve Berry's The Templar Legacy. It's not that Berry's novel has anything to do with cooking, it's that the book is so obviously an entry in what I like to call the "The Da Vinci Code writeoff." But where the winner of Pillsbury's contest earns extra points for creativity and fresh new ideas, apparently the entrants in the TDVC sweepstakes are convinced that imitation is the quickest route to success. At least after reading Berry's entry, it certainly looks that way. Few readers point to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as a literary success: commercial success, yes, literary, no. But just what has kept that book near the top of the best-seller lists for three years remains a mystery to authors and publishers alike (not to mention yours truly): it's clearly not that good a book. I always thought it was the relative newness of its puzzle-driven plot; others believe its biggest selling point is the book's controversial religious "revelations." Regardless, however, since The Da Vinci Code remains a huge commercial success, every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there is perfectly willing to bandwagon onto the themes, the puzzles, or both. Berry's work is just the latest - or at least the latest that I've read... The Plot - What there Is of One Retired government operative Cotton Malone and his erstwhile boss find themselves on the track of a huge secret. They're relentlessly pursued by a pack of monomaniacal monks as they scour the countryside of southern France and the Pyrenees, seeking the clues to a great treasure that disappeared in the fourteenth century. The monks - a secret order that's actually a linear descendant of the Knights Templar of Crusades fame - believe the missing treasure to be their "Great Devise," a priceless treasure of unknown origin that was lost when their order went underground during the Inquisition. Malone and his ex-boss, Stephanie Nelle, join forces with a half-Moslem woman (is "half-Moslem" actually possible?), Cassiopeia Witt and Europe's richest man, Henrik Thorvaldsen as they scamper from church to church, ruined abbey to ruined abbey. They're following clues left at the end of the nineteenth century by a reclusive French priest and his mistress, clues that are buried - of course - in a series of anagrams, jumbles, cryptograms, pictograms, and other assorted puzzles. When a schism splits the modern-day Templars into two unequal factions, Malone and company are joined by one faction while the ruthless "chief security officer" of the Templars heads up the pursuit. For men of God, those knights are pretty tough - and pretty deadly. Since Malone is a lawyer, he is - of course - possessed of superhuman mental powers to go with his great looks and his world-class "tradecraft," so we can be certain that he will eventually solve the puzzle and find the long-lost hoard. Whatever it is. Whoopee: I could hardly wait... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... It's Truly Hard to Decide Why I Hated this Book... It's hard mainly because I have so many reasons from which to choose, including (but not limited to):
Formula Zero Berry's work suffers from a multitude of faults throughout its 500 pages. For instance, I was appalled to discover that Cotton Malone was not a recurring Berry character (this is the first in the Cotton Malone series) - the whole "Magellan Billet" (what a ridiculous name) thread stands completely unsupported, even as Malone uses his considerable skills to protect and defend his erstwhile employer. The internecine wrangling at the abbey is so clearly derivative of television claptrap like "The Apprentice" as to be nauseating. And perhaps most telling, Berry could come up with but a single puzzle - and not a very good one at that. Only once did one of Berry's plot twists surprise me, and that was only because it was a double twist and I wasn't looking for the second turn. In any other literary climate, any book as potboilerish as Steve Berry's The Templar Legacy would fall off the face of the publishing world like a rock. It's populated by stereotypical characters, jammed full of improbably twisted plot points, and oh, so clearly engineered to capitalize on the popularity of Brown's book. It's imitative and derivative and it's a pale shadow of The Da Vinci Code, which is pretty hard to do because that book was only slightly above average to begin with. My advice on The Templar Legacy? Run like the wind. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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