The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Last Templar
Book Review: Spoilers Below
Summary: 1 Stars
Imagine Dan Brown, amidst writing his historical...ish... novels tore out all the uninteresting and predictable parts and tossed them on the floor, where they were later collected by migrant birds, who built a nest out of the scraps. Years later, after some of those pages were lost, some editor came back and took the nest and published it.
This is how The Last Templar came to be. History proves it.*
I unfortunately did not get to read reviews for this book, as I picked it up at the airport in Reno when I had run out of reading materials. I'm a sucker for medieval storytelling, so what the heck.
Man, what a mistake. The book's biggest problem is straightforward, cookie-cutter characters. Characters like this then lend to trite, hackneyed dialogue.
The premise of the book is this:
Four masked men steal a strange Vatican artifact while it is on displayed at the Met. This leads an investigator... a beaten-down, Catholic-background, trying-to-do-the-right-thing investigator (a Bruce Willis character if there ever was one)... to team up with a girl-power, know-it-all, secular archaeologist to hunt down this artifact. The fate of the Catholic church (and the world, the book assumes) hangs in the balance. Every cliche character the author can manage is squeezed in, including the power-hungry Catholic official and the old man wronged by the church who's back with a vengeance.
The story manages to be both boring and straightforward. Pretty much every event happens as you would expect it. The dialogue is awful. Sentences are broken up to be dramatic. Like this. It's as if the author wanted a Law & Order dun-dun after every chapter (which just happen to be modeled after Dan Brown's two-page, oh-you're-reading-so-much chapters). Want some examples?
"Sitting in the second boat, watching them with a look of muted delight . . . was William Vance.
He was cradling a shotgun."
. . . . .
DUN-DUN
---
"There in front of her was a brick wall.
It was a dead end."
. . . . .
DUN-DUN
So we come to the worst part of the book: the MOST formulaic, the MOST smug, the most oversimplified. I'm about to ruin the story, but I'm saving you $12 and a world of literary hurt. The female protagonist finds the artifact that could dismantle the entire Catholic church. But... she was just rescued by these kind islanders, who happen to be ... Catholic. They also happen to be poor fishermen who live on an island with their kindly, gentle fishermen wives. They are the only characters in the book who don't speak English, and they attend a whitewashed, homely cathedral from centuries past. I swear I am not making this part of the story up.
So when the main character gets her chance to reveal the Catholic faith for the scourge it is, she thinks about these kind villagers, at which point, she tosses the artifact into the ocean. She can't bear to unveil to these poor ignorant fishermen the truth behind their faith because, well... because they're so nice!
The Last Templar is awful. Please don't read it, unless you are willing to buy my copy.
The Last Templar Rating: 21 / 100
Subratings:
Story Idea: 4 / 10
Writing Style: 2 / 10
Excitement Level: 3 / 10
*Just as history has proven The DaVinci Code.
Book Review: File this under 'guilty pleasure'
Summary: 4 Stars
THE LAST TEMPLAR is yet another in the seeminly endless line of DAVINCI CODE clones, a fantasy/historical/romance/thriller if your will. As is typical with this new genre, the story starts with a flashback, this time to 13th century Acre as the Crusaders lost control of Jerusalem, then returns to 'the present day' as indicated by a few references to current events. We met our heroine, Tess as she, accompanied inexplicably by her mother and daughter (more on that later), arrives at a New York museum to attend a reception for the opening of an exhibit of Vatican Treasures. A group of four horsemen, dressed as Templar knights, enters the museum and steals some of the treasures then escapes, killing a few people along the way. This sets Tess, who just happens to be an archeologist, on the trail of a long lost Templar treasure. Tess, who also just happens to be single and beautiful joins forces with Sean, an FBI agent, who also just happens to be single and handsome. These two alone are able to solve the mystery behind this daring robbery because Tess just happens to recognize one of the horsemen.
By now a pattern is beginning to emerge - whenever the author finds that he has written himself into a corner yet another amazing coincidence takes place, the heroine just happens to be in the right place at the right time, just happens to know the right people, have just the right bits of information etc. In addition to those improbable items our heroes manage to find a precise location following an 800 year old set of directions despite the area being flooded, manage to get washed ashore.....and so on and so on. These sorts of improbable events are very common for this sort of novel, rather par for the course. What is more aggrevating is the author's tendancy to introduce pointless characters and events into the story. For example Tess's family are carefully introduced and then gotten rid after serving no real purpose. It was almost as though the author had been assigned a certain number of pages and needed some filler material.
So why four stars? This was a lovely, mindless story. Just enough action/adventure/romance to hold the reader's interest for a few hours making this a wonderful way to while away a wet, dreary weekend (or a long boring plane trip or any other occasion where escape is needed).
Book Review: Great Read
Summary: 5 Stars
The Last TemplarThis book is a great read. I purchased it used, but it was just like new.Book Review: Good and Bad
Summary: 3 Stars
Had some good moments and was going at a fast pace but then it would trail off and get really boring. The story just sort of falls flat on itself at the end and all the lead up means nothing. Nothing new and nothing really that interesting that hasn't been tried by at least 500 other authors since The Da Vinci Code became so popular. For me there is nothing in this book that ever made me saw wow or I've never heard/thought of that. When you get to the end of the book and go "well that was pointless" then you know the book wasn't that good. Don't read unless the only books you can read is Templar books.Book Review: I Hated Having to Finish It
Summary: 2 Stars
I picked up this book from the bargain bin, so I didn't feel compelled to finish it because of the money spent but because I had to find out what this thriller said was the secret that the Catholic Church had been guarding for millennia. An added bonus was discovering the origin and motivations of the mysterious Templar knights.
(We know that the secret is not the same as in the DaVinci Code, because the archaeologist-heroine discusses that theory early on with the FBI.)
I was disappointed in the movement of the story. The writer had a heavy manipulative hand; intelligent people acted stupidly and you could count on dei ex machina to keep things driving to the conclusion that the author wanted. On the plus side, I didn't see the last revelation coming, and only then did some earlier passages make sense. However, the ending also made me call into question the actions of the few characters who supposedly knew everything.
Criticizing sci-fi, fantasy, and spy thrillers because they're "unrealistic" may sound oxymoronic, but fans of these genres know what I mean. Characters should behave and events should flow naturally and consistently from the laws of these fictional universes, but here they don't.
***Spoiler that wasn't***** From the title I expected at least one character to reveal that he was a Templar Knight and that the group was still operating in the 21st century. Too bad---it might have improved the story.