Turn the Page

John Sandford, the pen name of Miami and St. Paul newsman John Camp, will publish his 20th "Prey" novel featuring Minnesota investigator Lucas Davenport in May. Over the last few years, he's begun branching out, adding some books to his series on über-hacker and thief Kidd and in 2007, beginning a new series with another investigator, Virgil Flowers. Flowers works for Davenport and is called in to probe bizarre or high-profile crimes, and Rough Country is his third outing. It's entertaining enough, although Camp makes what for him is the rare goof of telegraphing the villain behind the murder of a high-powered ad executive at a women's resort in rural Minnesota. His writing -- Camp owns a Pulitzer -- is as crisp as ever and the story never bogs down or clunks, although the characterization of Flowers doesn't pop out as much as in earlier books. The investigator seems less like an interesting person and more like a collection of quirks draped over a hangar and made to look like one. Camp's tendency to give the Flowers novels a kind of frat-boy brattiness doesn't help much with that, but there are a lot worse things decorating the bookshelves of America today than Rough Country and a lot worse ways to spend a few hours.

-----

Stephen Coonts is one of the brand names of modern techno-thrillers, sending secret agents, assassins and troubleshooters all over the world to right wrongs, neutralize bad guys and, on a fairly regular basis, save the world. In 2002's Saucer, he lightens up a bit by introducing farmboy genius Rip Cantrell, who happens across an ancient flying saucer while on a summer geologic survey with an oil company. A wealthy but greedy industrialist wants to exploit the saucer for its knowledge and make even more money, while government officials want to hide it while trying to learn its secrets. Rip, on the other hand, thinks it's his since he's the one who found it, and he wants its technology to benefit the whole world. He's helped by former U.S. Air Force pilot Charlotte "Charley" Pine, who just happens to be near his age, gorgeous and a superb aviator. Coonts wrote Saucer with a definite twinkle in his eye, walking the line between parodying his own techno-thriller genre and telling the story straight. Saucer could be a fine neighbor to the old juveniles that Robert Heinlein wrote for Scribner's, and is just as much fun to read.

-----

Modern thriller writers get more wrong about the Bible and church history than almost any other subject, but the history of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, usually known as the Knights Templar or the Templars, runs a close second. Jack Whyte, in Knights of the Black and White, manages to combine wild speculation about both into a didactic series of lectures that sinks what starts as a pretty fun medieval adventure. Whyte suggests that Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Templars, created the order as a cover for his real work, which was excavating the Temple of Solomon for the secret Order of the Rebirth of Sion of which he was a member. The Order guards secret knowledge handed down for thousands of years, which proves that Jesus was human, Paul was an evil manipulator, and that most everything the official church teaches is false. History records the names of only a few of the original nine Templars and records almost nothing of de Payens beyond his birth in France somewhere around 1070 and his death in 1136. A tabula this rasa makes an excellent canvas for pseudo-history, and Whyte borrows liberally from the discredited Michael Baigent/Richard Leigh theses of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in doing so. That would be no problem if he didn't insist on lecturing through his characters' mouths every couple of chapters about biblical scholarship, theology, morals and the like, and making a new shocking! revelation in between. Whyte can write some wonderful passages, as when his knights excavate an ancient chamber built exactly like one of their meeting-houses, but he's so consumed with showing why Everything You've Ever Known is Wrong that he kills any enjoyment he may have earlier developed. Get 50 pages or so from the end of Knight and grit your teeth and promise yourself you'll slog through to the finish. Then remember it's the first of a trilogy and toss it into the book donation pile.