Seduction by M J Rose

I am going to start with a huge disclaimer about my review of this book. I didn't enjoy this as much as I expected, mainly because it wasn't the book I expected to read.

To be honest, that is my own fault. I have read a number of M J Rose's books before and liked them well enough, but after reading the third book in her Reincarnationist series I decided that was enough for me. It's not that I didn't enjoy the books I read but thrillers aren't really my thing and I am not invested in the paranormal aspects to a great degree, and so I felt it was time to let this series go.

When the next book, The Book of Lost Fragrances, came out last year I stayed strong and didn't read it, just like I apparently didn't read the blurb closely enough when I was offered this book for review. I have a very clear memory of thinking that it was interesting that M J Rose was choosing to go in a new direction. I guess I was stuck on the references to Victor Hugo on the island of Jersey (I had no clue that he had lived there) and didn't actually read the rest of the blurb.

Here's the thing though... the blurb and the cover don't really help considering that there is nothing in either that tells you that this is part of the Reincarnationist series. And that is a real bug to me because as a reader I prefer to read a series in order. I prefer not to find out that a book is part of a series when I read the second chapter and recognise a character name from the previous books. And yes, I am sure that there are plenty of people who would tell me that this is a standalone book, and it was to a degree, but there were still a lot of references to the events of the previous book.

Anyway...enough of my ranty mcranty rant. How about the book itself?

There are three strands in the story that link together over time to form the whole story. The first and most interesting to me related to the aforementioned Victor Hugo who was living in exile on the island of Jersey along with his wife and some of his children, and his mistress. Very cosy! It was while living there that Hugo becomes interested in trying to communicate with his daughter Didine who had died in a boating accident ten years before. He becomes more and more involved with seances and, in doing so, opens himself up to other paranormal experiences. Along the way, Hugo records all of his experiences in some journals, including his relationship with a young woman named Fantine.

In the present day, Jac L'Etoile is asked to head to Jersey by an old friend. Theo and Jac shared an important friendship in their teens but they were separated and hadn't seen each other for many years. Jac is now a mythologist and she is intrigued by the Celtic links that are present in the ruins and the history of the island. When she gets to Jersey and Theo shares the Victor Hugo connection, she is even more intrigued and agrees to help Theo find the lost journals that could reveal more about the famous author's time on the island and also about the history of Theo's family.

The final strand in the story concerns a Druid priest who is called upon to make an unfathomable sacrifice. The emotional trauma to his family presents through time as the characters relive their conflicts time and time again through history in each new identity.

There is much to admire in Rose's writing. The language is evocative, drawing the reader to the past with ease, to the power of scent and it's role in memory and to the shadowy world of seances and ghostly presences. There is no doubt that the writing draws the reader into the story, building the tension as each new twist in the story seems to in turns ravel and unravel the threads in the story. The author must also be commended for not falling into the all too predictable trap of throwing in an obviously romantic conclusion. This doesn't mean that the ending isn't satisfying, because it is, but this is not a 'and they lived happily ever after kind of read'.

Having said that, there were threads that didn't feel fully developed to me, particularly in relation to the losses that Jac was trying to coming to terms with, and I would have liked to have more focus on the historical stories in particular.

If you enjoy a good thriller or like books that explore intellectual discussions of the paranormal realm with interesting historical settings, then this could be a book that you would enjoy. It wasn't a bad read for me, it just wasn't the book that I wanted to read right now. And I suspect that is actually a lot more about me than it was about the book!

Rating 3/5

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Synopsis

From the author of The Book of Lost Fragrances comes a haunting novel about a grieving woman who discovers the lost journal of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries.

In 1843, novelist Victor Hugo’s beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned. Ten years later, Hugo began participating in hundreds of séances to reestablish contact with her. In the process, he claimed to have communed with the likes of Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus—and even the Devil himself. Hugo’s transcriptions of these conversations have all been published. Or so it was believed.

Recovering from her own losses, mythologist Jac L’Etoile arrives on the Isle of Jersey—where Hugo conducted the séances—hoping to uncover a secret about the island’s Celtic roots. But the man who’s invited her there, a troubled soul named Theo Gaspard, has hopes she’ll help him discover something quite different—Hugo’s lost conversations with someone called the Shadow of the Sepulcher.

What follows is an intricately plotted and atmospheric tale of suspense with a spellbinding ghost story at its heart, by one of America’s most gifted and imaginative novelists.

The Hypnotist by MJ Rose

An FBI agent, tormented by a death he wasn't able to prevent, a crime he's never been able to solve and a love he's never forgotten, discovers that his true conflict resides not in his past, but in a…Past Life.

Haunted by a twenty-year old murder of a beautiful young painter, Lucian Glass keeps his demons at bay through his fascinating work as a Special Agent with the FBI's Art Crime Team. Currently investigating a crazed art collector who has begun destroying prized masterworks, Glass is thrust into a bizarre hostage negotiation that takes him undercover at the Phoenix Foundation—dedicated to the science of past life study—where, in order to maintain his cover, he agrees to submit to the treatment of a hypnotist.

Under hypnosis, Glass travels from ancient Greece to 19th century Persia, while the case takes him from New York to Paris and the movie capital of world. These journeys will change his very understanding of reality, lead him to question his own sanity and land him at the center of perhaps the most audacious art heist in history: the theft of a 1,500 year old sculpture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

International bestselling author M. J. Rose's The Hypnotist is her most mesmerizing novel yet. An adventure, a love story, a clash of cultures, a spiritual quest, it is above all a thrilling capstone to her unique Reincarnation novels, The Reincarnationist and The Memorist. 

When FBI agent Lucian Glass is attacked during the course of an investigation it isn't the first time that this has happened to him. The first time was twenty years before when he walked into the framing business owned by his girlfriend's father to find her dead and to be attacked himself during a robbery that crossed the line into homicide.

Now he finds himself on the trail of the Memory Tools - a series of objects that are believed to be "deep meditation aids that could help people access past-life memories." The legacy of this second attack are frequent headaches, and a unnerving compulsion to capture images of several women who he has never even met before. All he knows is that he must draw their faces and that he doesn't quite get them right. During the course of the investigation, he finds himself being hypnotised and that those faces are connected to his current case in ways he could never imagine.

In many ways, this is a by-the-book thriller. There are numerous characters, all with their own agendas, and seemingly unconnected until key moments in the story. There are dramatic and life threatening moments, complete with incredible escapes and moments of heroics from the major players in the story. 

The most desperate characters are those who are trying to gain possession of Hypnos, an eight foot tall statue that is said to hold the key to unlock incredible mental powers. Whilst some of those efforts include pursuing legal ownership of the statue, others are prepared to do absolutely anything, including destroy priceless artworks, and kill, to get what they want.

It is the destroyed artwork that begin to draw the threads of the story together for Lucian, for the destroyed painting is the very one that was stolen the night that his girlfriend was murdered, a crime that is still unsolved. It also brings him into contact with her cousin, Emeline, who maybe, just maybe might be the person who can finally help him get past what happened that fateful night.

I mentioned before that this in some ways is a standard thriller style novel. In other ways it really isn't because the background includes discussion of things like past life regression, as well as other forms of reincarnation and the spending time inside the rarefied air of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brings yet another fascinating aspect of the book to the fore.

At its heart this novel is a story about how far different people will go to get their heart's desire, in this case either the statue of Hypnos or the memory tools themselves. At its spiritual core it is a story about the ties bind people to their past lives. As a whole, it is multiple threads of plot woven together with skill.  And for Lucian, it asks the question can he ever get past the tragedies of his past.

When I mentioned a few days ago that I was reading this book, I talked about being uncomfortable with the fact that I was reading a series out of order. M J Rose responded in the comments and said the following:

What connects them is that there are ancient memory tools that have been lost and they aid in reincarnation and in each book a different tool surfaces but an all new group of main characters are involved.

Anything that repeats - like the foundation in NY that studies reincarnation and its directors - is written so that anyone can read any of the books out of order and understand everything. Unlike a book where the main character repeats - these are quite different.

I think given that many of the characters are new in the book, I didn't necessarily worry too much about the fact that I hadn't read the earlier books once I got into the story. I don't know that I necessarily felt the lack of that background, but I have no doubt that there would have been elements that would have been enhanced had I read the previous books.

The thriller is really a genre that I don't read that much of, so I enjoyed this step outside my normal reading comfort zone, and I am planning to read the earlier books in this series soon.

Rating 4/5

Thanks to Meryl L Moss Media Relations for sending me a copy of this book for review purposes and to TLC Booktours for letting my jump on board their blog tour for this book. You can visit other stops on this blog tour at the following stops.

Wednesday, July 21st: The Book Vixen review
Wednesday, July 21st:  The Book Vixen Author Guest Post
Thursday, July 22nd: Rundpinne
Monday, July 26th: Musings of a Bookish Kitty
Tuesday, July 27th:  Fiction Vixen Book Reviews
Tuesday, July 27th:  Layers of Thought Guest Post and Giveaway
Wednesday, July 28th: The Cajun Booklady
Thursday, July 29th: Bellas Novella
Friday, July 30th: Savvy Verse and Wit
Monday, August 2nd: Books, Movies, Reviews! Oh My!
Tuesday, August 3rd: Fantasy & Sci Fi Lovin’ News and Reviews
Wednesday, August 4th:  Rex Robot Reviews
Thursday, August 5th:  Adventures of an Intrepid Reader
Friday, August 6th: Luxury Reading
Monday, August 9th: The Book Faery Reviews
Wednesday, August 11th:  Book Junkie
Thursday, August 12th:  Starting Fresh
Monday, August 16th: The Tome Traveller
Wednesday, August 18th: Layers of Thought

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

WHAT WAS LOST WILL BE FOUND…

Washington DC: Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned at the last minute to deliver an evening lecture in the Capitol Building. Within moments of his arrival, however, a disturbing object – gruesomely encoded with five symbols – is discovered at the epicentre of the Rotunda. It is, he recognises, an ancient invitation, meant to beckon its recipient towards a long-lost world of hidden esoteric wisdom.

When Langdon’s revered mentor, Peter Solomon – philanthropist and prominent mason – is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes that his only hope of saving his friend’s life is to accept this mysterious summons and follow wherever it leads him.

Langdon finds himself quickly swept behind the facade of America’s most historic city into the unseen chambers, temples and tunnels which exist there. All that was familiar is transformed into a shadowy, clandestine world of an artfully concealed past in which Masonic secrets and never-before-seen revelations seem to be leading him to a single impossible and inconceivable truth.

A brilliantly composed tapestry of veiled histories, arcane icons and enigmatic codes, The Lost Symbol is an intelligent, lightning-paced thriller that offers surprises at every turn. For, as Robert Langdon will discover, there is nothing more extraordinary or shocking than the secret which hides in plain sight…

More than 5 years after the release of The Da Vinci Code, after all the controversy, after the court cases, the movies, documentaries and all the hype, the follow up book from Dan Brown was finally released a few weeks ago. I read both DVC and Angels and Demons prior to starting blogging so I don't have any reviews to look back on, but I do remember loving DVC when I read it, and having many interesting conversations with some work colleagues about it. Then I read Angels and Demons and thought that it was actually a better book. So where does this book sit compared the previous two Robert Langdon novels?

Before I answer that question, I would like to make a few observations.

Robert Langdon is kind of like a college professor version of James Bond. In each book, there are the chases, the hi tech gadgetry references scattered through the story, and the willing, attractive female companion. All he is missing really is the martini and the tuxedo, but I am sure that if Dan Brown could manufacture the right situation that could happen, albeit reluctantly.

Dan Brown (or whoever) obviously does a lot of research about lots of very interesting topics. I have no idea if he left any of the research out, but it certainly felt a lot like if he found out something then into the book it went. Some of the information was interesting (for example the origins of the word sincerely which I shared in the Teaser Tuesday post), but other times it was too much info dump. Given how much happens in the space of just a few hours at times it was easy to get lost with all the information and events going on.

One thing that Brown does do well is to write short, sharp chapters, generally with some kind of hook at the end that makes you want to keep reading. Some of the plot devices he uses are completely over the top (for example, there is a Star Wars moment (you know, "Luke, I am your father" reveal) and times when you think you know what is happening to a character but you really are about to be blinded by science or improbability), but you do want to keep reading to see what happens next.

After the success of his earlier books, you could do tours of the various locations so that you could walk in the shoes of Robert Langdon and see the various monuments, art and buildings that he saw. Dan Brown certainly is good at inspiring you to want to see those places for yourself, and I have to say that this book is no different. I would love to go to Washington and see the various locations in the book. I would have loved to before reading this book, but certainly the desire to spend time at places like The Smithsonian Institute and Library of Congress has grown as a result of doing so.

Once again Brown starts off with a blanket statement "All organisations in this novel exist, including the Freemasons, the Invisible College, the Office of Security, the SMSC, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. All rituals, science, artwork and monuments in this novel are real." Further on in the book he mentions that the Freemasons would never talk about their organisation or their rituals. I guess that the one thing that guarantees is that at the very least, there isn't going to be the kind of backlash that there was from the Church to the previous books. I do have to wonder what secret organisation will be the subject of his next book.

The hard thing for me to gauge now as a reader is this. If I had of read this book five years ago, would I have enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. The short answer is I don't know. Or maybe another question should be if I was to reread either of the previous books would I feel the same amount of enjoyment as I did the first time around. Again, I don't know the answer to that question either. When I don't have hundreds of books lying around waiting to read for the first time maybe I will get around to rereading these two books to find out.

What I can tell you is that I didn't close this book with the same sense of satisfaction as I did with the two previous Robert Langdon books, and it felt a lot like hard work slogging my way through the codes, symbols, science and mythology that makes up so much of the story in this book.

Reading back over this, I have just realised that I haven't mentioned anything about the plot really which makes this more of a reaction than a review, but never mind. If you have read either of the previous two Robert Langdon novels, then you have a fair idea of what to expect.

Rating 3.5/5

The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Famous journalist sentenced to prison.
Mikael Blomkvist, editor of Millenium magazine, is found guilty of slandering billionaire financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.

Henrik Vanger, C.E.O. of the powerful Vanger Corporation revives hunt for solution to niece's disappearance.
Harriet Vanger vanished 40 years ago from secluded Hedeby Island.

Lisbeth Salander declared legally incompetent

Computer hacker Lisbeth (code-name "was") loses control of her own affairs. The notoriously delinquent 24-year-old surveillance agent could not be reached for comment.

If you were to ask me what types of books are the hardest to write reviews about, normally I would say it was those books that were just mediocre in that they didn't inspire great enjoyment, but they also were not so terrible that you were tempted to wallbang them. Despite the fact that this book is definitely NOT one of those mediocre books I find myself struggling to decide where to start. The main reason for this is that there is just so much going on in this book.

There are in effect three major strands within this novel. The first is the story of Mikael Blomkvist. He is a investigative journalist and publisher who, as the book opens, finds himself on the wrong side of the law, found guilty of libel against wealth financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. Not content with winning his case, Wennerstrom seems determined to destroy the magazine that Blomkvist runs with his best friend and on/off lover Erika Berger. Mikael decides that his best course of action is to make himself scarce to give the magazine the best chance of survival.

Enter wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger. After conducting his own investigation into Blomkvist, Vanger offers him an unusual opportunity. He wants Mikael to move to the country and live on the island where many of the Vanger family make their homes, and write a family history. The more important task for Mikael is to investigate the disappearance of Vanger's niece Harriet some 40 years prior. This investigation has run into dead ends almost from the beginning and yet on his birthday he receives a gift that can only be from the killer, if there was a killer, seemingly to torment him until the end of his life.

As Mikael investigates it becomes clear that there are many secrets in this powerful family - feuds between family members, fanatical Nazism, abuse, and many other unpleasant secrets. Even Mikael cannot believe what he finds out!

The third major character is Lisbeth, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Lisbeth is a ward of the state due to the fact that she is perceived to be incapable of managing her own affairs. In fact, she has socialisation issues, but is a brilliant hacker who freelances to perform background checks and the like.

As Lisbeth and Mikael come together, events take turns that are difficult to imagine, and in the hands of a lesser writer could become over the top and unbelievable. Luckily for us, Larsson mostly avoids the potential pitfalls in such a dramatic story! That doesn't mean to say that this is a perfect book because it isn't by any means! As you read through the latter pages of the book, there appears to be at least one, if not two, possible natural endings but instead the book carries on for a further 50-100 pages, almost as though the author realised there were too many loose ends to be carried onto into the next book.

Lisbeth is unique. She is someone who skirts on the edges of society and of the law. She is edgy and difficult to those around her with lots of issues that she needs to deal with. Most of the major characters are well defined and there are very few two dimensional characters throughout the book.

Orginally written in Swedish, there are some issues with editing and translation. At one point for example he is talking about a road name where he says it was obviously enough called Stalagatan (or something like that - I've returned the book now so can't check). As someone whose only exposure to Swedish is the product names at Ikea, it was nothing obvious to me, I can tell you!

I noticed on Larsson's website that there is currently a movie being made of this book. For a first book this is an assured, complex, edge of the seat thriller that has so many different themes. Larsson died after handing in the first three books in this series, so his planned series will never be completed. However, I can't wait to read the next books in the series and to enjoy the ride that he was taking me as a reader on for as long as I can!

This book was the winner of the Boeke Prize and Glass Key for the best Nordic crime novel of 2005, and I am therefore choosing this to be one of the books that I have read for the Book Awards Challenge.

In my opinion, these awards are well deserved. I highly recommend this book.





Have you reviewed this book? If so, leave a comment and I will add a link to your review.

Mysteries in Paradise
Strumpet's Life

The Crystal Skull by Manda Scott

"It's a lump of rock, Stella; nothing more. No stone is worth dying for."

Except it's not just a lump of rock. It's a life sized crystal skull made by the Maya to save the world from ruin; a sapphire so perfect, so powerful, that men down the ages have killed to own or destroy it.

Cedric Owen, the skull's last Keeper, died that it might keep its secret for the next four centuries. Now Stella has found it, and someone has already tried to kill her. Like the skull-keepers of old, she and her partner, Kit, are being hunted - but by whom?

The Mayan prophecies say that if the thirteen skulls already in existence are not reunited, the world will end on 21 December 2012. Four times already, life on earth has been destroyed: by flood and fire, quake and storm. The fifth age ends in a destruction of man's making, and there is only one chance to avert it.

Facing an increasingly implacable enemy, Stellla and Kit struggle to decode the Owen diaries. Their search takes them from the intellectual rigour of Cambridge University to the untamed wildness of England's prehistoric stone circles.

Both know that time is against them and they only have days - hours - left to uncover the secret that may yet save the world.

I have previously read three book by Manda Scott - all of them from the Boudica series of books set in Roman Britain and featuring a fierce warrior princess who is leading the tribes against the Roman invaders. Having enjoyed them all, I was kind of skeptical when I read the description for this book mainly because it was completely unconnected to the Boudica books with a different setting, a different genre. Just different!

As a wedding present, Kit O'Connor takes his new wife Stella Cody to a stunning underground cave where he believes he will find the famous blue crystal skull that has long been part of the legend of St Bede's College, Cambridge. Kit has managed to do what so many have failed to do before him, and that is decode the fabled ledgers that were left behind by Cedric Owen hundreds of years before. With Stella's background as a caver, Kit is sure that this time they will be able to find the skull, but what he doesn't know is what changes this will bring to their relationship and their lives.

Without knowing it, Stella has a deadline looming, and she and Kit must do everything in their power to continue to decipher the hidden messages, along with the help of their friends, and to find the instructions hidden within. One of the major issues though, is exactly who is a friend and who is a foe? Other questions to be answered include why does the skull seem to speak to her? What is it that she needs to do? And what will happen if she doesn't? Who is it that is trying to stop them?

Alternating with the story of what is happening with Kit and Stella, we also follow what is happening in the life of the aforementioned Cedric Owen. He is from a long line of family members whose job it is to be the Keeper of the Skull. It is Cedric's destiny to learn all the secrets of the skull, and to preserve them for one who comes after him. He must leave the messages in such a way that not just anyone will be able to understand, but that the right person will. Along the way Cedric meets with such luminaries from the past as Nostradamus and Dr John Dee. Gradually he learns that the skull that he has in possession (or perhaps he is in its possession given how the skull communicates and directs his life) is likely to be Mayan in origin and is one of a set that must be guarded and protected, and then placed in the exact right position at the exact time in order to stop mankind from destroying the world. The stone leads Cedric (and his companion and swordsman) from England, to France and to South America, and then back to England again many years later.

I have now read a few of these parallel storyline novels where there are the two different stories interwoven to give the whole picture usually with one set in the past and the other in the present. Quite often, I find that I enjoy one of the threads more than the other, but in this case I really didn't feel that one aspect was weaker than the other.

There is suspense and tension in both strands of the narrative - danger, thirst for knowledge and incredible personal risk. As with the Boudica books, there is an underlying mystical themes within the pages of this book. It is obvious that this kind of subject is one that fascinates Manda Scott, and yet she is able to include it in her novels without seeming to be overly evangelical about whatever it is that she believes in.

One of the major questions that this book does ask revolves around the date of 21 December 2012 - a date that apparently several cultures believe will herald the end of mankind - pretty gloomy thought really!

If you are after a very enjoyable thriller filled with suspense, mystery, history and a lot of adventure, this book is definitely worth considering.






Given that this book is the first book that I have read so far this year that has been published this year, there is no way I could not include it as one of my books for the Pub 08 Challenge even though it wasn't on my original list of reads! One down....seven to go!




Crossed posted at Historical Tapestry

The Lady in Blue by Javier Sierra

In Los Angeles, Jennifer Narody has been having a series of disturbing dreams involving eerie images of a lady dressed in blue. What she doesn't know is that this same spirit appeared to leaders of the Jumano Native American tribe in New Mexico 362 years earlier, and was linked to a Spanish nun capable of powers of "bilocation," or the ability to be in two places simultaneously.

Meanwhile, young journalist Carlos Albert is driven by a blinding snowstorm to the little Spanish town of Ágreda, where he stumbles upon a nearly forgotten seventeenth-century convent founded by this same legendary woman. Intrigued by her rumored powers, he delves into finding out more.

These threads, linked by an apparent suicide, eventually lead Carlos to Cardinal Baldi, to an American spy, and ultimately to Los Angeles, where Jennifer Narody unwittingly holds the key to the mystery that the Catholic Church, the U.S. Defense Department, and the journalist are each determined to decipher -- the Lady in Blue.

When I read The Secret Supper by this author, I was quite pleased to find a new author that I enjoyed reading. So when I saw this book at the library, it was a no-brainer for me - I borrowed it straight away! Unfortunately, for me, this was nowhere near as good as The Secret Supper. Maybe it is because it is supposed to be much more of a thriller style novel, but it certainly didn't have the thrills if that is the case.

This book is made up of a series of very short chapters telling four different stories that in the end converge in the climax (or perhaps slight peak?) at the end of the novel. This, for me, was one of the major flaws in this novel. The chapters are so short that with each change of chapter and also storyline, it just felt incredibly choppy to me!

The four threads follow quite different people - the first is a young woman by the name of Jennifer Narody who lives in Los Angeles. She is consulting with a psychiatrist because she has been having incredibly vivid dreams about the past, about a time that she could know nothing about. She is somewhat restricted in what she can tell her therapist because of the secrecy surrounding the nature of her previous employment, which included time spent working for the government and in a joint project with the Vatican in Rome.

which was trying to scientifically generate the ability to The second is about Carlos Albert. He is a somewhat jaded young man, working for what sounded like it was kind of a like a paranormal magazine, following up on stories that make you go hmmm. He is being drawn/led to a story about people who have the ability to bilocate. Several months previously he had interviewed a priest about a project called Chronovisionbilocate. Chronovision is a Vatican project which is investigating the phenomenon of being able to bilocate which they want to use to be able to use people to actually view historical events as they happen. When, during a severe snowstorm Carlos and his companion coincidentally finds that the only open road leads them to a small town where he finds the priory where nearly 400 years before a young nun had the ability to bilocate, he decides to dig further or to use the correct vernacular, to follow the signs.

Our third thread mentions the aforementioned priest, Cardinal Baldi, who spoke to Carlos about Chronovision. For his slip up about the ultra top secret project, he has been called to Rome, and breaking the rules about not having direct contact with the other members of the project, he arranges to meet one of the other members, only to find out that the other man had just apparently committed suicide, and now his own life is in danger. He must also follow the signs to try and discover what the other members of the group had been working on, and who and why someone wants to put an end to the project.

The fourth, and quite frankly, most interesting aspect of the story, focused on the events of 400 years ago with the appearances of the Lady in Blue to the native Americans in what would now be New Mexico I believe. As the missionaries were sent to the newly acquired lands by the Spanish government, they were astounded to find that there were already many converts to Christianity who claimed to have seen a Lady in Blue, or at least paved the way for conversion.

Since the publication of The Da Vinci Code there has been many novels published exploring the various aspects of church conspiracies and mysteries. This is yet another. The one saving grace for this novel is that it is not about Mary Magdelene!

With a top secret studies focusing on music providing the key ingredient on how to bilocate, angels in red high heels committing crimes like theft kidnapping and terrorism, this is a hodge podge that failed to fully engage my attention, and was definitely a disappointment for me.

Perhaps one of my main issues was that every time Chronovision was mentioned I couldn't help but think of the Chronoguard from Jasper Ffordes Thursday Next series? It certainly didn't help!

Rating 2.5/5