Intelligent popcorn
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I thoroughly enjoyed the Lost Army - A great discovery (as it were!).
The Last Secret is nearly as good, slightly harder going. As he knows his 'world' you really get a feel for the sights/sounds and places and the hostile environment. Khalifa is 'Morse' with niccotine stains!
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Intriguing characters & nice pace - a great read!
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This is the second novel in the series by Paul Sussman featuring Detective Inspector Khalifa - the first being 'The Lost Army of Cambyses'. I purchased the two books together and I'm glad I did or else I would have missed out on this great gem! I really didn't enjoy the first book all that much finding the majority of characters so dull I couldn't bring myself to care when their lives were hanging in the balance. The one character that was interesting however was Khalifa who appears again in the second book as the Detective with a moral conscience. It is not necessary to read the books in chronological order as there are only a few passing references to the first book and The Last Secret of the Temple is by far the more superior of the two.
I won't go into what the book is actually about in this review as I think there is enough said about the story in the synopsis and in some of the reviews here but what I will say is that I've not read a book of this type that was this good since I read the Dan Brown's books a few years back. It is very easy to get into and the story does keep you hooked until the end. The book looks at religious conflict, racial prejudices and hatred, morality and power and it deals with these themes effectively without becoming too political or too sentimental. I can't wait for Paul Sussman's next novel and this one is definitely highly recommended!
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Stick with it
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In Egypt's Valley of the Kings a body is found, kicking off a series of events and discoveries for chain-smoking Egyptian detective Yusuf Khalifa. As he delves deeper into the dead man's background, Khalifa realises that there is more to the case than at first meets the eye. The story veers from the invasion of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD to the suicide bombings and inter-racial hatred of present-day Israel, in search of an ancient artefact that could send the Middle East up in flames.
Paul Sussman's second book is hard to get into. The fragmentation of the first part, as Sussman sets the scene from the viewpoints of several protagonists, almost lets the book down before it's really gotten off the starting blocks. But stick with it. From the moment the various characters meet and piece together the mystery bit by bit, the pace starts to hot up, leading to a triple crisis at the end and a superb cliffhanger in the final moments.
The publishers have used a quote from the Independent newspaper's reviewer for the cover of the paperback edition of the book : "The intelligent reader's answer to The Da Vinci Code". I guess this is referring to the depth of the background geographical, political, emotional and psychological scenery that goes along with the "explosive" plot, a depth clearly missing from Dan Brown's massive bestseller.
Or perhaps it simply means that all is not as it seems, and therein lie a number of explosions not caused by concealed explosives belts or underground arsenals.
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The Last Secret of the Temple - Paul Sussman
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All in all this was a good novel. It was pacey, if it took a while to get going. Also it was very contemporary, being set in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with the backdrop of history: the fall of Jerusalem in AD70, medieval Crusades, Nazi death camps and the Nazi hierarchy's interest in esoterica.
The characterisation was OK, better than in some novels of this genre. At least they are given backgrounds and are not two-dimensional. The protagonist Khalifa was well depicted and a likeable, good guy. However, as the protagonist, I was surprised that he does not play more of a part in the story. Other characters such as Har-Zion, Layla and Ben-Roi play an equally important role. His Israeli colleague, Ben-Roi, I did not like and was someone who I just wanted to shake out of his slumber and depression. As mentioned in another review, Sussman adds a twist at the end concerning the female protagonist. I won't say what it is but, given what she had been through, it was unlikely and clumsily done.
The actual "secret" is rather obvious, from the opening chapters I could tell what is was. Nevertheless, its journey to its present location is recounted well and was a good sub-plot to the modern-day Middle East.
I felt that the novel was a tad too long at 694 pages. I think some of it should have been edited out and the novel could have been written in 500 pages. I also found the constant reference to smoking annoying. Every other character seemed to smoke! Another negative was the over use of expletives. I'm no prude and recognise that such things can add to a character's personality, but I think Sussman could have cut back on that a bit. The author also makes liberal use of native sayings, be it in Arabic, Hebrew etc. This could have been a problem for the reader but a glossary of terms can be found at the back of the novel. The glossary also includes information on terms, places and historical characters mentioned in the text, which adds to the accessibility of the novel.
All in all I enjoyed the book and would read other works by Sussman. Recommended.
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Good if you like to read about political conflict
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Personally, not my kind of book, so I'm pretty glad I got it half price in a sale. I never got round to finishing it - yes it started out really well and gripped me from the start which is why I gave it two stars - but I began to get totally bored with it before "Part Two" in the book. The reason for this was because it just kept going on and on about political/religious conflict. Please - there's enough of this going on in todays news, I don't want to read more about it in a fiction novel.
For me, this conflict overpowered the murder and historical mystery which this novel is supposed to be about, and personally, if I can't make my way halfway through a novel at least, its not worth the time or money.
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