Total Waste of Time
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I wish to goodness that I had not wasted hours of my life ploughing through this badly-written book. The adjective "tedious" does not even come close. Maybe it has lost something in the translation from Spanish (or maybe it's boring in Spanish, too). The basic premise is a very good one but it D-R-A-G-S interminably and the ending is highly unsatisfactory. Don't bother with it!
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Tedious beyond belief
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This is a must read....that is if you want to be bored to tears. I can't believe how anyone can rate this book 4 or 5 stars!! At least Dan Brown's books have good and likeable characters, good plots and some excitement. This book moves at a snails pace, maybe slower.I persisted with this book to the end and really wished I hadn't bothered. Boring characters, slow plot, terrible, just terrible. If you want a decent historical/mystery choose Dan Brown, at least he knows how to put a book together. Forget this book........unless, you have no imagination and a high boredom threshold.
I'm sorry but I hate this book and wished I hadn't wasted my time.
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a bit of class
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Marco Valoni, chief investigator for Italy's Art Crimes departmeent is obsessed with the Cathedral in Turin or rather a series of 'accidents' that have occurred over the years. He has little to go on except years of experience and a gut instinct that the incidents are related and some how connected to the famous Shroud, that and the victims of the various incidents who appear to have had their tongues and fingerprints removed. 33 AD the king of Edessa is dying of leprosy and is persuaded by his queen and chief advisor to seek the help of the man from Nazareth. He writes to the Nazarene asking him to travel to Edessa but the man is on his way to Jerusalem for Passover and His destiny awaits but he promises the king will be healed.
Urfa in Turkey- an old man struggles to keep faith with his ancestors and the promise countless generations before him have upheld. Across the globe a group of very wealthy men meet for the next round in an old game of cat and mouse and a young woman is plagued with nightmares of fire, war and death. How these many threads are woven together into a page-turning thriller is what makes this a book well worth reading. There are no easy answers,all of the characters feel very human, they make mistakes, they succumb to very human frailties- jealousy, anger, fear, violence. There is no neat tying up of loose ends at the end which means this is no trite morality tale nor is there a sense of being cheated which unfortunately dog so many 'biblical' thrillers these days.
The translation is good although there are quite a few typos- a minor irritation only, as the story sweeps along at quite a pace and the breadth of the narrative across time is enthralling. Recommended to those who appreciate a bit of class in their religious thriller
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A gripping story and a page turner of first order - not just another religious mystery
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Religious mysteries are since Dan Brown's famous novel very much en vogue. I bought a few and some of them were pretty bad, so I was quite reluctant to go for another.
But with Julia Navarro's "The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud" I should have not worried.
She has an unique talent of writting a gripping stories and this starts with page 1. So no worry that one has to go first through 100 pages before the story takes off. I was hooked straight away. She follows an established pattern of tackling the story from five different perspectives. These perspectives merges step by step till the final climax. This keeps the suspense through the book. I never read religious mysteries because I wanted to learn soemthing about the religious aspects or as I am a believer in conspiracies stories, but as a crime story. And this you should do here too.
I believe Julia Navarro's first novel is a great achievement and I am looking forward to her second novel. Already now she can match the great established crime writers of our day. I enjoyed this book 100%.
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A Murder and Mayhem Bookclub review
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It has been said that the Turin Shroud is more than just a lasting image of Jesus Christ after His death. Many believe it also possesses legendary powers of healing, which can take away all physical ills of those who lay their hands upon it. Through history it fell into many hands, and many thought that it was the Knights Templar who came to be the final guardians of the Church's most holy relic, the true shroud of Christ.
It falls to the special Art Crimes Department to investigate when the Cathedral of Turin is once again set ablaze, not for the first time in its long history. Department Chief Marco Valoni does not believe that such desecration was merely an opportunity to vandalize such a treasured structure, however. More to do with what the public believes the Cathedral to contain. At ceremonial times the Cathedral does in fact house what is known now in modern times as the Shroud of Turin, or the Holy Shroud. In reality, the relic is more often responsibly housed and hidden away in a bank vault. Valoni is more than puzzled that the Italian church and police hierarchy seem resistant to the idea that an attempted theft of the shroud is behind the repeated break-ins. The church is usually wise to its enemies, and in the present day they still number as many.
Debut author Julia Navarro has taken on an incredibly difficult task with writing such a complex novel, divided as it is between past and present action and littered with factual references to holy relics, religious history and the like. You have to applaud what Navarro has achieved with THE BROTERHOOD OF THE HOLY SHROUD for the massive undertaking it must have been. This novel was a number one best seller in Navarro's home country of Spain, and has achieved impressive rankings on lists elsewhere.
Putting all the bandwagon comments firmly to one side, Navarro has spun a very intricate tale around the shroud that was believed, and is still believed by some, to bear the likeness of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. Some may even find the blend of fact and fiction quite satisfying in that it all sounds very plausible and to some extent may provide a possible explanation of the importance others have placed on the holy shroud in the past. This is also why some may dislike this novel, and that can't be helped - it is, to be remembered, after all, a work of fiction and no lines are drawn between what is generally established as fact and what is the whimsy of the writer.
As always, what may have been lost or interpreted inaccurately in translation is a question mark. TBOTHS certainly has a very dry narrative, with some very bizarre stances taken by its highly skilled and educated characters. Not one has been fleshed out in a realistic fashion and this is a weak point of the novel. As we are dealing with a thriller, the involved monologues are not expected or required but as it will always be the characters, not events, that drive even an action plot, they need to be believable.
The dual timeline is managed extremely well with the appropriate pauses in action balanced between past and present. The past is given that glorious, melodramatic spin that we are used to seeing in old movies set about the same time as the events in this novel, with the present here being more sparsely depicted and at a greater sense of pace.
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