Making the Rounds

Reading one of the many thrillers that hinge on the old order of the Knights Templar makes one wonder what contemporary institution the suspense aficionados of the 2800s will have as the most common grist for their mills.

James Becker sets The Lost Treasure of the Templars, his seventh novel and the first of a new trilogy, in the light of that order of military monks' secretive existence and mysterious end.  Bookdealer Robin Jessop acquires a centuries-old container designed to look like a book, complete with booby trap and encoded parchment scroll. Her search for the code's key brings in David Mallory, a former police officer who's become an expert on encryption since leaving the force. It also gains the attention of a ruthless, clandestine Italian-based operation that dispatches assassins to acquire the long-lost book-container and its scroll, and make certain that no one who's seen the scroll is around to tell anyone about it.

Robin and David object to this plan, and do so with enough success to begin a multi-continent chase and quest to solve the parchment's meaning. David believes it could be the key to finding the titular treasure, and also the only way they will be able to convince the authorities they were the targets of attempted violence rather than its perpetrators.

Compared with one of the best-known minings of the Templar history, The DaVinci Code, Becker does quite a bit better with the history of the order and the political machinations that eventually brought it down. And while his recounting of one of the Templars' final battles in the Holy Land is detailed, fast-paced and engaging, much of the rest of the book isn't.

His dialogue is stilted and he treats every scene as less of an episode and more like an instruction manual, outlining every step as Robin sends an e-mail or David closes down his computer. He tries to maintain some tension by not having the couple fall in love already (although it's hard to imagine them not doing so somewhere in volume 2), but they don't have character dimension to make the delay of the inevitable all that interesting. They're also annoyingly sanctimonious; during one conversation about the persecution of the Templars they remark on how awful it is that religious people do such evil deeds when atheists never have. "Annoying" is as much as this kind of (un?)holier-than-thou bit is worth; how can one get too worked up about the opinion of two grown adults who've apparently never heard of Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge or North Korea?

In any event, while the story starts out with a pretty conventional treasure of wealth, by the end of the volume we're getting hints of a "true" treasure that will, of course, rock the foundations of the Church who will do anything to prevent its discovery. All of this puts the trilogy on a short leash; if the colors keep matching the numbers like this then somewhere about halfway in book 2 will be a good stopping place.

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As he's been wandering around the country, Jack Reacher has seen a spot on a map called "Mother's Rest." He's curious about the name and decides to visit this tiny railroad stop to learn its origin. But an unfriendly populace wants him and the pretty private investigator he's met there to get gone, and Reacher has never been someone who pays much attention to people who tell him what to do without being able to live up to the title of the series' 20th novel, Make Me.

He and the investigator, Michelle Chang, will find themselves headed to Oklahoma City, Arizona, Los Angeles and Chicago on the trail of the secret of Mother's Rest and what Chang's missing colleague was searching for when he came there. They'll deal with an investigative reporter, Eastern European crime lords, and an über-hacker who searches the "deep web" to try to find clues to the mystery.

Childs has dialed down some of the sillier aspects of a couple of recent Reacher stories -- he may win every fight, but it costs him more than skinned knuckles. In the same time, he's dialed up some others. A stairwell confrontation in Chicago takes pages as Childs describes at length the options facing both men and their decisions to a level that steps right on the border of self-parody (and makes you wish one or the other of them would slug either Childs or you to get the scene over with).

Whether or not Childs is on target with his research into the deep web and some of the other story features isn't super-important. He uses them plausibly enough to give Reacher some serious figuring out to do and some nasty villains to battle, which is just about what anyone reading the series could or does ask for.

The main question Reacher may face in the coming years is how Childs will handle his aging. He's passing 55 if Childs keeps to the timeline established early in the series and it may be about time to enter the sort of slow aging Robert Parker granted Spenser sometime in the mid-1990s. But then that's always the problem authors face, because it's a whole lot easier to write after you're 60 than it is to kick ten or eleven guys' behinds at once.