Splintered Icon
-
-
1.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
As an antique map dealer in a small English town, Harry Blake appreciates the quiet life. But when a local landowner asks him to value a 400-year-old journal and is then brutally murdered twelve hours later, Harry begins to suspect he's being pulled into something sinister. What does the dusty journal contain that is a matter of life and death? Why is someone prepared to pay Harry a fortune for it? He turns to marine historian Zola Kahn to uncover the mysteries. And when they meet at the old Greenwich Observatory, Harry is convinced there is more to Zola than meets the eye. The trail of the journal leads him into a world of deadly Elizabethan conspiracies, with a thread of history that takes him through a thousand years of religious intrigue back to the blood-soaked Crusades and a long lost icon whose rediscovery has the potential to ignite a worldwide religious war. Combining the thrill of a contemporary chase novel with a historical puzzle this is one novel that will leave readers gasping for breath.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this suspenseful Da Vinci Code knockoff from British author Napier (Nemesis), Harry Blake, an antiquarian book dealer specializing in old maps and manuscripts, agrees to help Sir Toby Tebbit translate a 400-year-old journal, written in code, that Sir Toby has inherited from a heretofore unknown relative in Jamaica. The manuscript chronicles the adventures of a young cabin boy, James Ogilvie, who traveled to the Americas as part of a secret mission for the Elizabethan crown. When a mysterious woman approaches Blake about buying the journal, he refuses to sell. Later, Blake returns to the Tebbit household to discover that Sir Toby has been brutally murdered. Teaming up with rival historian Zola Kahn and Sir Toby's daughter, Debbie, the trio soon join a race to determine the meaning behind Ogilvie's encrypted text. A trail reaching as far back as the Crusades leads toward a holy relic that could be worth millions or could be the key to a worldwide terrorist plot. Deftly mixing history, science and fiction, Napier keeps the action escalating toward a satisfying climax.
Customer Reviews
Splintered Icon
This review is not about the book, which I would like to read. But rather about the formating, I downloaded the sample book and the formatting was so very poor that it renders the book unreadable. There are so many formatting errors like "Hun dred", many words with mysterious spaces in them, often as many as ten to twelve on a page. As I said I would like to read it, but I am not about to buy it only to find out the horrible formatting continues beyond the sample chapters. Unfortunate really.