The Moses Stone Paperback

This book is among my favourites. It moves you from one city and country to another. From Morroco to the UK to Israel. It is a mixture of history mystery and police action. It contains valuable historical and biblical information that makes you wonder how this world is going to end. In short its great.

I finished this in less than 48 hours, and not because it's a masterpiece, but because it's easy. It is one in a long line of "relic hunter" books around at the moment. This one features Chris Bronson, a British police officer, who for the second time (following Becker's previous: The First Apostle) finds himself hurtling around looking for ancient secrets. By no means is this awful, parts of it are enjoyable and interesting, however, there are occasional massive plot holes and there were a couple of times when I felt the author was insulting my intelligence - did we really need such a detailed explanation of a substitution cipher, just because Chris Bronson might be a bit dense it doesn't mean your readers are Mr Becker.

I'm sure that the 'Moses', linked to the word 'stone', gives you a fair clue as to what this one is about.<br/><br/>Unfortunately, this is another one that begins well enough, but which could have been much better. Becker decides to slip into an already well-worn formula, even though the other one of his I read previously 'The First Apostle', I remember as being really quite good. Makes you wonder if his publisher asked him if he had a 'Me Too' historical/religious artefact thriller lying about and Becker rush finished this one and they pumped it out.<br/><br/>What really irritated me, is something that happens in many of this type of book. It is the 'technique' of having the characters explain to each other, at great length, the historical or technical information the author feels the reader needs next to understand the novel or the next development in the story. Having the information conveyed by a character, rather than the author just putting the necessary information into the narrative, always makes me wonder how lucky our plucky hero is to stumble across the leading experts in their various fields with total recal and photographic memories. And it annoys the whathaveyou out of me. 'The Moses Stone' does it at nearly every turn. It's not alone in doing this, as I've said, but it really got to me before the end of the story.<br/><br/>I may have to think twice before reading another of his.