It's Just One More Damned da Vinci Code Wannabe
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Author: Eric van Lustbader
Title: The Testament Genre: thriller Let me see: you've got your long-hidden secret whose revelation would rock the Catholic Church to its very core. You've got your scholarly (and ravishingly handsome [and excruciatingly intelligent]) young gentleman solving a string of arcane puzzles on the treasure hunt of the millennium. You've got your beautiful young woman trotting along in his wake. You've got your secret society of Crusaders hot on the trail of the scholar, stone killers who'd stop at nothing to get the... whatever it is. You've got your rapid-change itinerary across Europe. Come to think of it, you've got... The Da Vinci Code, right? Wrong: you've got Eric van Lustbader's The Testament, though one can easily be forgiven for the confusion. When Dexter Shaw shuffled off this mortal coil (ahead of his time, I might add) he left his son a couple of odd bequests. One of them was a key that fit nothing in his apartment, the other was a lithe young lady who, apparently, would guard his life with her own - sort of a personal Presidential Protection agent. Seems that Dexter had been one of the Haute Cour, the "inner circle" of a centuries old order called, sensibly enough, The Order. It had been Dexter's job to keep a monumental secret, hence his title of The Keeper. The Secret? The location of The Cache - which, apparently, contained both a fifth Gospel (written by Christ himself) and the mysterious substance He used to perform His miracles - the fifth element, a.k.a. The Quintessence. Why, The Quintessence might be the means by which He was resurrected that long-ago Easter Sunday. And here I thought the fifth element was Milla Jovovich. Hmmph. Young Bravo (short for Braverman) Shaw is apparently possessed of clairvoyance, since he easily discerns the secret of his father's strange key. Unfortunately, instead of revealing The Cache, it merely unlocks the first clue in his late Daddy's little treasure hunt. Of course, Dexter had spent decades preparing his brilliant son for just this eventuality - he speaks five (maybe six) languages, and is a world-class cryptographer, among his many other talents one of which he almost immediately plies upon the luscious Jenny, his Guardian (yeah, that one). The hunt that lies ahead will cross a continent and flush out a conspiracy generations old. Bravo will trick and be tricked, though he's more often the bamboozled than the bamboozler. Look for political infighting to rival anything in the Enron trial; double-, triple-, and even quadruple-crosses galore; and don't miss the all-too-expected soulless killer who glories in his work. Don't get too bored, though... Though most recently he's contributed merely by extending the antics of Robert Ludlum's character in The Bourne Legacy, Eric van Lustbader has been in the books biz for a couple of decades. Much of his early work included Asian-flavored spy/assassin thrillers like Shan, Jian, and Angel Eyes. Now, however, he's hoisted himself aboard the Dan Brown bandwagon with his own version... let's call a spade a spade, his own rip-off of The da Vinci Code. Given its plot outline that's virtually indistinguishable from the European antics of Bob and Sophie combined with the surfeit of puzzles, The Testament is clearly a shameless attempt to mine the mother lode Robert Brown exposed with his little tale of religio-historical conspiracy. As such, the book has plenty of appeal for less discerning devotees of its fictional genre. But where The Da Vinci Code succeeded, The Testament unfortunately fails. I will say this for it - Van Lustbader is a lot bloodier than Dan Brown, with a stratospheric body count. Be prepared for some fairly grisly details. The super success of Brown's thriller depended upon twin factors: the puzzles, presented to the reader so that he or she might at least attempt a solution; and the ongoing mystery about the great secret. Those factors are missing from The Testament, however: the contents of The Cache are revealed within the first fifty pages, meaning that the only mystery is where it's been stashed. The series of clues are so arcane (and sometimes so stupid) that it stretches the imagination past breaking to believe that Bravo can solve them - and solve them in a few minutes. Take, for instance, an arcane code that resolves to two words in Latin: vine and purpure. Bravo somehow divines that vine refers to a spiral staircase (of which there is apparently only one in the entire city of Trabzon, Turkey; and that purpure refers to heraldry's representation of purple as diagonal cross-hatching down to the right. Yeah: I don't believe it, either... Van Lustbader - or maybe it's just Lustbader - is well known for plot-driven novels, which is most certainly the case here. His characters, what few there are, seem to be lifted entirely from the shelves of some off-brand writer's boutique, Stereotype City. Some are even laughable - his Guardian, Jenny, though allegedly chosen because she's the best (even if she is a girl), gets sapped at least twice and outwitted half a dozen times. For a guy so bright he can solve complicated codes in his head, Bravo is remarkably gullible, since almost everyone is capable of pulling the wool over his eyes - but it obviously runs in the family... Nope, Braverman Shaw has been well-prepared for his cryptographic escapades, but his father neglected to fill him in on a lot of the things a father really should teach a son. Too bad. So... what we have here is just one more attempt to capitalize on the phenomenal success of Dan Brown's not-all-that-great book. This one lowers the bar a couple more notches. Skip it for being a pale shadow of something that wasn't all that great to begin with. And if you do happen to read it, won't you explain to me why Van Lustbader titled it The Testament instead of The Quintessence - seems no one's interested in The Testament that's hidden in The Cache at all... all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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