Brajesh's Review: The Alexander Cipher

This is how a thriller should be written. Truly unputdownable.

Rating: 4.5/5
0.5 extra for Egypt ;)


 

Kim's Review: Alexander Cipher

The Alexander Cipher introduces an Indiana Jones type character with Daniel Knox a disgraced American Egyptologist with 25% Bedouin heritage, currently biding time as a diving instructor for hire in Sharm el Sheikh.

In Will Adams, first book: The Alexander Cipher Knox tries to unravel the mystery behind the whereabouts of the remains of Alexander the great and his magnificent catafalque. The action constantly shifts from Sharm to Cairo to Alexandria to Tanta to Siwa and to the Suez. Adams has an interesting style akin to the filming of Jack Bauer's 24.He focuses on different characters, shifting the narrative to their respective points of view and then leaves the character in a cliff hanger before moving to the next.

This technique makes his books unputdownable and I often felt like skipping sections to continue where the current character's tale continued.

In The Alexander Cipher, Knox has quite a few people gunning for him - an influential shipping agent, the head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, a rich Macedonian businessman and the daughter of an Egyptologist he used to work with. But he also has friends who would do anything for him.

Alexander today is identified as a Greek hero, but his empire was actually the Macedonian Empire. Most of the region was divided by the Treaty of Bucharest of 1913, following the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria each took control of portions of Macedonia.

Macedonian seperatists, a corrupt Head of the SCA, opportunistic locals - all have their own motives and agendas for finding the tomb. The Alexander Cipher is peppered with a lot of trivia from Egyptian and Macedonian History.

Its a wonderful read and quite unputdownable. A real page turner. I can't wait to read the next in the series

Rating: 4.5/5


 

Kim's Review : The Hadrian Enigma - A Forbidden History

The Hadrian Enigma - is a story of love, intrigue, politics, and scandal set in pagan Rome and Egypt, about 130 years after Christ.

The story is based on real characters and falls in the genre of speculative fiction. It starts with the discovery of the body of the Bythinian youth Antinous rumored to be Caesar Hadrian's lover or eromenos. While history says that his death was an accidental drowning in the Nile, George Gardiner weaves a story of intrigue around the incident that is quite entrancing.

The tale is revealed as a series of depositions to Special Investigator Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus who is charged by Caesar, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Antinous within 2 days.

Within the first few pages, it seems the suspect is so evident, that you wonder why the story runs to 476 pages, but as you read along, you realise there are many more players in the mix.

Gardiner has written an interesting and gripping story, but I do wish the editing was tighter. Given that large parts of the book are third person reports, a lot of the minute details included seem superfluous and out of place. He seems to have suffered from a typical writers problem of having done extensive research and then wanting to include as much of the details as possible into the end product.

The language keeps oscillating even when the same person is speaking, from high brow Latin and Greek peppered sentences (sending one scurrying to wikipedia and dictionary.com) to American colloquialisms like "that guy".

Font sizes change suddenly and inexplicably, quite often. Words are underlined for emphasis, which left me feeling like I was reading a manuscript or a draft, rather than a final copy.

While the novel is based on the same sex relationship of Caesar Hadrian and Antinous (currently deified as the God of Homosexuality by some) and marketed as a male-male romance novel, it isn't a turn off to the average reader who wants to read it as a mystery novel. What is vexing though, is the repeated use of the word "crutch" when the author actually means "crotch". Whether this is a problem of the "spell check" software or new slang (I checked urbandictionary.com which did not imply any such meaning to the word - crutch), I'm not sure.

Its an extremely readable story, shedding insight into the life and times of a not-as-renowned Caesar, who had one of the most peaceful and prosperous reigns of his dynasty. It's a page turner, once you get past the initial Greek and Latin terms. I just wish the editing could have been tighter. Then this book would have really stood out for me.

Also Published on desicritics.org