THE KEY TO KELLS

A police contractor is plagued by visions of an ancient Irish mystery.

As O’Connor’s novel opens, Key Murphy, a contractor with the Philadelphia police department narcotics task force, is in a tense situation. He’s been captured by vicious drug dealers who are trying to decide whether to shoot him expeditiously or beat him to death slowly. Murphy is 6 feet, 3 inches tall and skilled in the martial art of Krav Maga, but he’s nevertheless facing certain death when he’s saved by a group of his colleagues led by his commanding officer and best friend, Buck McCoy. McCoy is worried about Murphy, who’s been acting oddly for some time now and half-heartedly alludes to PTSD as the reason. The real reason is far wilder. Murphy is plagued by snatches of memories not his own—glimpses of medieval monks in tunnels. He’s stunned to learn that his own father had identical experiences; these memories are an ancestral burden linking the family to the monks who labored over the famous Book of Kells, which was in a monastery sacked by the Vikings in 806 and then stolen in 1006 and recovered with its cover and some pages missing. Murphy learns that his family members have been the age-old secret guardians of those missing pages, and an ambitious IT billionaire has learned that the pages may contain clues to finding a hidden treasure. These revelations about his true nature are world-shaking for Key; “Whatever this was, I knew I had crossed a line, and there was no return,” he thinks. “Nothing would be the same.”

O’Connor takes these familiar Dan Brown–style thriller elements—hidden societies, secret histories, shocking revelations buried in historical events (plus a certain cosmopolitan flavor; the narrative bounces from Philadelphia to Jamaica to Ireland and elsewhere)—and combines them to craft a thriller that will be pleasing to any fan of The Da Vinci Code (2003). His characters alternate between sounding like they just stepped out of an Ed McBain novel and reeling off lines straight out of an Errol Flynn melodrama; e.g., “You, too, must heal and unite. You will face many more trials. You will sin again, and like me, you will pray for forgiveness.” O’Connor skillfully ratchets up the tension by frequently shifting his scenes. Not only do Key’s glimpses of the ancient past grow longer and more detailed (including increasing revelations about a man named Aedan, the legendary warrior-monk credited with originally saving the Book of Kells), but O’Connor also jumps from the more recent past to the present and back in short, snappy chapters. He increases the complexity of his story with the introduction of Key’s love interest, a smart and forceful young Jamaican woman named Arin who’s the inheritor of some ancestral family secrets of her own, but O’Connor makes the wise decision to put Key’s rough, instinctive heroism at the heart of the story (“What is it with us Murphy’s, [sic] always trying to save the world?”). Key and Arin don’t have much in the way of personal chemistry, but O’Connor’s gift for personality-driven dialogue smooths over most of the more wooden moments.

A pleasantly twisty and engaging adventure in which buried memories hold the key to present-day dangers.