Covenants Made and Broken

In 2007, British thriller author Andy McDermott sent archaeologist Nina Wilde on a trip that would lead to her finding Atlantis. Along the way, she also found romance with Eddie Chase, a former British soldier assigned to be her bodyguard. In 2009's The Covenant of Genesis, Nina and Eddie uncover evidence of a civilization thousands of years older than any previously known. But they also find themselves in the crosshairs of a deadly group known as the Genesis Covenant, an uneasy partnership of assassins and commandos made up of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Factions within the three Abrahamic religions know about this ancient civilization and have agreed to work together to make certain any signs of it vanish without a trace, along with the people who discovered them. Nina and Eddie have now made that list, and they race across the world and against time in order to expose the truth about the ancients and disarm their Covenant pursuers. McDermott has a flair for dialogue and action scenes, and he makes Nina and Eddie's journey a puzzle-solving quest that shows certain other, more famous puzzle-oriented authors (OK, it's another Dan Brown slam. Sue me) how that should be done. His premise is kind of silly -- the three religions agreed to work together because evidence of the ancients could undermine the Genesis story of creation upon which they all rely. If he's like most of his countrymen, McDermott hasn't been inside a church in awhile, so he may have missed that wide segments of Christianity and Judaism especially don't take Genesis literally anymore, yet their churches and synagogues have not crumbled. I'm not aware of Muslim opinion about the historicity of Genesis or I'd include them also. McDermott could have pruned Covenant's chase scenery and helped it as well, but neither of these problems should keep a reader from an enjoyable few hours with the beautiful archaeologist Dr. Wilde and her Statham-esque beau.

-----

David Weber has a knack for creating wonderful places for his authorial imagination to play in. The praises of the Honorverse, home of the galaxy's best, brightest and bravest Hornblower-ette, Honor Harrington, have been sung before in this space. Weber's other main series these days is set on a world called Safehold, in which the last remnants of humanity cling to life following their near extinction. In the series' first book Off Armageddon Reef, humans are in the last stages of their war against the genocidal Gbaba, whose species paranoia prompts them to exterminate any sentient race they meet. A single colony ship escapes the Gbaba and deposits its passengers on Safehold, where they will maintain a very low level of technology in order to stay beneath their enemies' notice. But the colony administrators, who turn out to be pretty unbalanced, decide humans should never progress technologically and they create a religion based on that, wiping the colonists' minds of all memories of Earth, the Gbaba or space travel. They themselves become archangels of this new religion, which fights and defeats a faction that wanted to stay technologically dormant for awhile and then try to recover so they could regroup and defeat their enemies. Almost nine hundred years later, a woman who died saving the colonial ship is resurrected inside an android body and sets about the task of reintroducing science and its methods to Safehold. She's opposed by the formidable Church of God Awaiting, the religion the administrators set up, and by human ignorance of any of their real history. Over the course of the next two books, the android, who takes the name Merlin, gradually gains allies and is able to mount the beginnings of an attack on the Church alongside the king of the island nation of Charis. Merlin is also able to slowly advance the Charisians' technology, moving them from about a 15th century level to a 17th. By the time of A Mighty Fortress, this king and several others know the truth about human history, but the Church forces are regrouping after several defeats and have learned a few things themselves about how to fight. This open-ended saga has a lot of potential; even after Merlin and his allies finally manage to liberate Safehold from the corrupt Church (which of course they will; they're the good guys), they'll still have to move up the technological ladder to the point that they can fight and either hold off or defeat the Gbaba. Fortress suffers from way too many epic conversations. Weber's fascination with his world's political and philosophical situations leaves him unable to avoid spending chapter after chapter on what read like meeting minutes. His own writing clichés litter the narrative: Every character shrugs several dozen times or equivocates a statement with an "Oh," a comma, and a labored simile on the narrator's part, and so on. He desperately needs an editor, but Tor Books didn't make money by telling its writers to write shorter books that sell for less. But Safehold and its humanity have a situation that's very interesting to think about, and Weber's descriptions of sea battles would probably sit just fine with C.S. Forester. He's pulled out of these kind of doldrums before, so maybe the 5th Safehold book can manage at least a little less talk to go with its action.