2008-09-21 Predictable action adventure story...

The story starts with a scientist becoming a victim of the Hindenburg disaster. Then our hero, mining engineer Philip Mercer, is in Central Africa and, among other things, stumbles upon a new love target who also works for the government - needless to say they join up against the forces of evil. Then ancient history is drawn upon, terrorist threats are introduced, an unknown order is revealed and countries from Egypt to Russia are brought into the picture. Du Brul ties all of these together to produce his adventure story.

But it all develops very predictably. There is non-stop action some of which is hard to swallow. There also seemed to me to be a lot of superfluous pages as Du Brul raved with too much detail - I suspect nothing would be lost if you skipped 10 pages or so when you spot these sections. There are, however, some interesting political insights.

This is an adventure story which sees the writer draw on a host of disparate and historical threads. He doesn't do a bad job with his weaving but this sort of stuff has all been done before and Du Brul fails to deliver anything memorable or special. But you'll probably enjoy it if you're looking for a bit of escapist fiction.7/10