IN SEARCH OF THE GATES TO HEAVEN

In Logan’s adventure novel, a modern-day devotee of the Knights Templar fights to preserve their legacy.

In this sequel to Rainbows End (2023), the author follows the mystical adventures of Zarfidi Virtue, one of the last remaining allies of the Knights Templar, who, as the story opens in 2024, is pursuing his mission to guarantee a long-standing Christian presence on Temple Mount by excavating deep under the ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem. He and his allies (including Elizabeth Corday, the head of the company overseeing the excavation, who gets more of the spotlight here than she did in the previous volume) are opposed by the forces of evil in the form of the “white witch” Annie Palmer and the “evil spirit” Morgan le Fray; their battles and searches for ancient relics (“I took Excalibur from the dying Arthur in the lake at Camelot”) take them all over the world. Logan makes very little attempt to orient potential new readers to the events or personalities that were established in the previous book in the series; neophytes are thrust into the narrative with only very feeble running synopses for context. New and returning readers alike will have to deal with other obstacles: There’s a good deal of lazy writing, from cliches like “out of the blue” and “new lease of life” to innumerable repetitions of “for some reason,” and there are careless spell-check-proof gaffs like “For a while they disgusted the possibility.” The sheer pace of Logan’s narrative can make the events depicted feel compellingly urgent, and his characters’ tendency to philosophize (“Sometimes, the force of blind ambition only leads one of courage into the field of delusion and self-destruction”) is often engaging. Still, most readers will likely find this a confusing jumble of a narrative.

A murky and often baffling adventure story.