FRIEDRICHSTRASSE CENTRAL

Logan (The Legacy of Two Gemini Knights, 2014) jumps 700 years forward from his first volume, bringing the story of the Templars into the 20th century in this wide-ranging historical novel set primarily in Germany and Australia.

Iva Davies, a young Australian, is about to embark on an adventure that will change his life. It’s 1979, and Iva, a geologist employed by an iron ore company, is in Singapore on a brief holiday. While nightclubbing, his sees a beautiful young woman who seems European. There is a commotion, during which the woman loses a trinket that had been hanging from a chain around her neck. Iva retrieves it—a ring bearing a five-pointed star—but when he goes to her hotel to return the star, he is told the woman, Arabella Maueraberger, has already checked out. He tracks her to Moscow, where he learns the ancient ring, believed to contain mystical properties, was given to her by her father, Peter Maueraberger. Peter is a former Nazi PR attaché to Goebbels and now lives in Dresden. Arabella suggests Iva return the ring to him. Gradually, Iva, driven by curiosity, is dragged into a global web of political, financial, and religious intrigue. Logan’s overstuffed narrative moves back and forth from the mid-1930s and ’40s to the early ’80s, the underlying theme centering around modern-day Templars who are still hoping to build the Third Temple in Jerusalem, which will complete life’s circle and usher in the end days. Readers will need a score card to keep track of all the characters, much less their multiple agendas. Only Iva rates as a consistent good guy. Awkward prose littered with errors (e.g., “the bank was required to pay much more higher bribery costs”) encumbers an already complicated saga that includes Nazi-stolen Jewish religious artifacts from Africa, the theories of Carl Jung, Vatican money laundering, and the East German and Polish movements for independence from the Soviet Union.

Most interesting for its political backstories but a very slow read.