The Last Secret of the Temple
Categories: Mystery & Suspense
The astounding commercial success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, with its irresistible combination of cabalistic hokum and pseudo-historical authority, spawned imitations that left many book lovers with piercing conspiracy-fiction hangovers. It happened to me. But my breaking point came when I encountered "The Da Vinci Code Diet."
Paul Sussman's new thriller, The Last Secret of the Temple, seems to possess standard ingredients found in a Da Vinci Code knock-off. It posits a deep archaeological mystery, involving a treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem, which the Romans destroyed in 70 AD. It has a mysterious document penned in coded Latin during the Crusades. And, of course, it has the Nazis storming into the conspiracy in 1944.
But Sussman aims higher in his intriguing police novel set in Israel and Egypt amid the violence and acrimony of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the Valley of the Kings, Egyptian police detective Yusuf Khalifa probes the murder of Piet Jansen, an elderly hotel-owner bludgeoned while illegally collecting artifacts. A symbol on the old man’s cane, found nearby, disturbs Khalifa. It reminds him of evidence from his very first murder case. Hannah Schegel, an Israeli woman, was brutally slain in Egypt 20 years before. The case has haunted Khalifa ever since, because the wrong man was arrested for the crime.
In Jerusalem, Israeli police detective Arieh Ben-Roi fields Khalifa's request for additional information on Hannah Schlegel’s past. She was, it seems, a Holocaust survivor. Ben-Roi is a big, angry, alcoholic cop, seething with rage at Arabs. His bride, Galia, was blow-up in a terrorist suicide-bombing. It doesn't make Ben-Roi any happier to be asked to assist the Egyptian police.
In East Jerusalem, Palestinian journalist and activist Layla al-Madani receives an anonymous letter citing her notorious interview with a shadowy Palestinian terrorist. Enclosed is a copy of a text written in encyrypted medieval Latin in the 12th century. The author of the document was the man who rebuilt the Temple of Jerusalem during the Crusades. It relates how he came upon the hiding place of an object of great power and beauty.
Ben-Roi and Layla uneasily join forces to search for the artifact. Its powerful allure cuts across the political spectrum. Everyone want to get their hands on it: the police of two nations; the Palestinian terrorists; the angry Zionist extremists; and government officials from among Israel and Arab countries.
A little bit of woo-woo creeps in to the stirring climax of The Last Secret of the Temple. But the mystical effects don't sully Sussman's ambitious thriller that's grounded by characters with complex personal histories and conflicted emotions regarding the volitile political dynamics of the Middle East.
I enjoyed the book a lot, and I've made note to track down Paul Sussman's first archaeological thriller, The Lost Army of Cambyses.
