An entertaining and thoughtful race to find a historical gem and a potentially world-changing truth.
A debut archaeological thriller examines the possible existence of ancient scrolls that could change the face of Christianity.
Ellen Shea is a star graduate student in the Fordham University Antiquities Department in New York City. Her command of foreign languages is prodigious: she can (and does) boast of a masterful grasp of Spanish, French, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and other languages. She’s recruited by an unscrupulous classicist—professor Paul P. Parkinson—to inspect two manuscripts written in Koine Greek and Aramaic he has come into possession of. Parkinson believes there are considerably more documents and that the entire bunch amounts to the elusive “Quelle,” thought by many to be entirely apocryphal. Legend has it that St. Papias exhaustively compiled a historical record of Jesus based on eyewitness accounts, including his Apostles, constituting source material older and potentially more reliable than the New Testament. The professor sends Ellen to Granada to track down these scrolls and compensates her generously for her labor and expertise. She travels with Mateo Barefoot, a mysterious and resourceful guide. Problematically, there are two other teams also hunting for the scrolls, both considerably less scrupulous about the means they adopt to achieve their ends. In a parallel narrative, the historical background of the Quelle itself is developed, which sheds light on the doctrinal unfurling of the Christian faith. In his book, Keats certainly shoots for formulaic genre fiction with all the signature elements: a dangerous archaeological quest, amoral competitors in search of a theologically significant prize, and the back story of a corrupt and conspiratorial Roman Catholic Church. Thankfully, Keats works within those stale parameters with considerable verve and charm, and his writing crackles with wry wit. Ellen’s academic mentor, Monsignor Brahaney, acerbically describes the professor: “Well, Parkinson was beyond ruthless, damn close to sociopathic, less interested in the research than what it brought him. Think Cromwell, Ellen, in tweed.” The author’s research is also extraordinarily deep and raises provocative questions about the meaning of Christianity independent of its institutional incarnation. Finally, Ellen turns out to be a companionable guide through the tale, both razor sharp and full of spunk. Anyone drawn to the genre can only hope a sequel adventure reprises the character.
An entertaining and thoughtful race to find a historical gem and a potentially world-changing truth.Pub Date: June 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9904489-0-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nonester Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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