THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF CHARLES BROKAW

Booklist review, August 2009

"Thomas Lourds, academia’s most accomplished (and ruggedly handsome) linguist, is on location, shooting a documentary, when his fetching BBC producer, Leslie Crane, drops a mystery in his lap: an ancient bell with a seemingly untranslatable inscription. Then a Russian colleague, working on a cymbal with similar markings, turns up dead. Soon the game is on: Lourds, Leslie, and Natasha, a policewoman pledged to avenge her sister’s death, chase (and are chased) halfway around the world as they try to discover the importance of the artifacts and their relationship to a recently excavated site that, this time, really promises to be Atlantis. Brokaw gets almost everything right here. Short, gripping chapters move the action from Egypt to Russia to Africa to London, while in Rome, a power-hungry priest, part of a secret religious society, has his own plans for the instruments and the earth-shaking knowledge they represent. Frequent gun battles are buffered by explanations of esoteric knowledge, details of the archeological dig, and some heated sex. Occasionally, the characterizations are thin (and, near the end, certain actions don’t make much sense), but Lourds remains strong throughout: Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code. Look out, Dan Brown, Brokaw can play this game a lot better than most of your imitators."