3 of 5 stars
Series: Templars 8
My version: Paperback
Fiction Crime, thriller
Penguin Books
2013
Bought
Retired Army Ranger turned historian John Holliday has thwarted the plots of Rex Deus, the twenty-first-century incarnation of the Templars, all over the world. Now, the lost journal of explorer Percy Fawcett leads Holliday deep into the South American jungles on a quest to uncover the greatest mystery of the Middle Ages…
Trailed by an infamous tomb raider and menaced by a tribe of hostile natives, Holliday and his crew uncover a five-hundred-year-old society hidden in the cauldron of the Amazon. Descendants of the Templar Knights, they exist for one reason: to hide and protect the holy artifact taken from the original Temple of Jerusalem by the first Templars: the legendary Ark of the Covenant. But will Holliday’s obsession with the truth finally kill him?
To be honest, several times here I was not really seeing a whole lot of point in this volume. Unless it was to fulfil a contract. Maybe he was contracted to do nine but ran a bit out of steam and decided to go off. Though…this does pull together a few strands of ‘out there.’ Mainly, the idea that the Templars, after their destruction/dissolution, some of them anyway, managed to escape and sail off to America. I’ve seen several books, fiction and non-fiction based around this theory. I haven’t read enough about it to come down either way, so I’m open-minded. It does lead me on nicely to thinking that, in general, this has been a series for the conspiracy theorists. Catholic cults, secret organisations behind everything, the Vatican having stuff in secret archives that would destroy them…all that. Though with the latter, I’m not sure if anyone would be too worried about that any more. As if it could be worse than paedophilia. The rocking the foundations of Christianity also.
Topical though. As as soon as I was finished, if not before, I began seeing articles about ‘The Lost City of Z,’ or something similar. Which seems to have plenty to do with the lost city andPercival Fawcett that this book is all about. Strange.
If nothing else, Paul Christopher has a great talent for making it all flow and read well and plausible. My imagination is not stretched too close to breaking point – most of the time. And always great fun, Indiana Jones, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fun. With enough added nonsense to make Graham Whatsit fans salivate. Though having said that, it’s maybe not far enough out on that there limb for them.
You can buy Lost City of The Templars at Booksplea.se
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