THE GOLDEN CITY

Less-than-rip-roaring final installment in Twelve Hawks’ Fourth Realm trilogy (The Traveler, 2005, etc.).

Brothers Gabriel and Michael are Travelers, mystics who have the ability to journey between parallel dimensions, or realms. They find themselves aligned with opposite sides in the conflict between the Brethren, a shadowy group bent on acquiring and maintaining power, and those who work to thwart the Brethren's nefarious plan to establish a global surveillance network known as the Panopticon, designed to squash any and all efforts at resistance. Michael, the brother who works for the bad guys, is given a lesson in Machiavellian tactics by the Half Gods, a group of technologically advanced beings who have established Orwellian control over the Fifth Realm, and he returns to our dimension to consolidate his power. Meanwhile, gentle Gabriel travels to the hellish First Realm to rescue his beloved Maya, a member of the Harlequin warrior sect, dour fighters dedicated to protecting Travelers from the Brethren. After cementing his position as a leader of the Brethren and the Evergreen Foundation (their public face), Michael sets a plan in motion to increase his organization's power by generating terror in the populace. He hires a psychopath to kidnap children, thus increasing calls for greater surveillance, while Gabriel engineers a bold play to inform the world at large about the shady deeds perpetrated by the Evergreen Foundation. Despite the fact that this trilogy revolves around a high-stakes and often violent struggle between the forces of good and evil, it is oddly boring. Only a few well-wrought action sequences may hold the reader’s strained interest; the decidedly half baked inter-dimensional travel cosmology and bland New Age-y philosophizing will not.

Tepid and vague.