The Last Ember by Daniel Levin

Summary and Review

Jonathan Marcus is a young, high powered attorney from New York. His background in classics--he was once a fellow at the prestigious American Academy in Rome, gives him the perfect background for legal work dealing in ancient artifacts of dubious ownership. One afternoon, he is handed a memo telling him to board a plane for Italy. In Rome, he finds himself trying to defend a mysterious client's ownership of two ancient pieces of Roman marble. The seemingly innocuous court case brings him face-to-face with an old girlfriend and together they are thrown into a deadly race to recover an ancient artifact from the last temple in Jerusalem.

The Last Ember has a clear political agenda. It is clearly anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel, and was written to counter alleged historical revisionism occurring in the Holy Land. I have no problem with Levin writing from this viewpoint, but I think the reader should be informed of it upfront. Daniel Levin's website, www.daniellevin.com, is straightforward and makes his views clear.

I picked this book up from the Readers' Choice table in my local library. The storyline as summarized on the back of the novel sounded intriguing enough, and I thought it would be a nice break from some of the hefty non-fiction histories that I've been reading lately. I have to say that I was really disappointed.

As I said, the idea for the book is interesting, but I can't even give Daniel Levin credit for that. Have you read The Da Vinci Code or watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or National Treasure? If so, all you need to do is throw in some Nazis (oh wait, Indiana Jones already took care of that), a mysterious, conspiratorial group of wealthy religious fanatics (check, The Da Vinci Code), a family legend passed down through generations (check, National Treasure), a race against the bad guys through the underground of Rome (The Da Vinci Code again), the Knights Templar (check, Indiana Jones, National Treasure, and The Da Vinci Code) and an ancient artifact, sought after for its power but lost to history as a mere legend (again, check, check, check).

No joke, the plot for this book was lifted straight from these previous storylines. The characters were rote: the noble, indefatigable policeman, a la Brown's Bezu Fache, the sexy, smart and uptight Sophie Neveu/Abigail Chase/Elsa Schneider female sidekick character, and the hero, in this case modeled after the author himself, a former-American-Academy-scholar-turned-international-lawyer, all brawn and brains.

There was even a scene in which the hero is trying to save his colleague, who is dangling over a precipice, from certain death. Marcus yells to his friend to give him his other hand, but the colleague, who is clutching a priceless historical find in that hand, refuses to let go, and so slips from Marcus' grasp, falling into the abyss below (p. 270). I could almost hear Harrison Ford saying, "Elsa, give me your other hand, honey. I can't hold you!" and Alison Doody's reply, "It'll be ours, Indy! Yours and mine!" just before her glove slips off and she falls screaming into the crevice.

Seriously.

But you know what? I could have dealt with all of that. After all, that's how much of literature happens, building and borrowing from previous works. I could even have looked past the utter cheese in the book, such as the description of Jonathan Marcus' and Emili Travia's first sexual encounter, when the description of Marcus removing Travia's clothing is likened to an archeologist "uncovering archaeological strata that required great study and attention" (p. 333). Ugh. That is just. so. bad.

But anyway, I could have gotten past all of that if it hadn't been for the unbelievably poor characterizations. For the most part, the characters were extremely one-dimensional--all good, all heroic, or all bad. And the ones who weren't--well it was hardly a surprise. As paradoxical as it sounds, even the duplicitous characters are irritatingly one-dimensional.

Most irritating was the way that Levin wrote the character of Emili Travia, the sexy and supposedly smart former colleague-cum-lover of Jonathan Marcus. Supposedly, Emili is so brilliant that she has a post as a preservationist with the UN--deputy director of the International Centre for Conservation in Rome. She's received prestigious awards and can even, upon entering a dark, partially ruined chamber, instantly ascertain that the stone came from quarries in Jerusalem rather than Rome (p. 350). Yet she doesn't know the origins of the name "Maccabee," has never heard of the Hanukkah story (pp. 174-175), and when faced with a fresco depicting the life of Joseph of Egypt, she is at a complete loss to identify it:

"These frescoes," Jonathan said. He trained his beam on a series of ancient paintings that lined one of the corridors. "They look recently excavated." In the first painting, the pigment had faded, but the figures were quite clear: a young man, in a neck chain hitched to other prisoners, pulled heavy stones.

"I don't recognize the myth," Emili said. "Sisyphys pushing a boulder?"

"No," Jonathan said. "Look at the next painting." The same young prisoner, Jonathan noticed, the chain still around his neck, but he was now standing before a king, who listened raptly. The prisoner was pointing above his head, where two rows of cows stood side by side among starts in a night sky.

"In this last frame, a slave has been brought from prison before a king," Emili said. "It looks like an Egyptian pharaoh."

"Yes," Jonathan said, "and he's interpreting the pharaoh's dream, pointing to skinny cows and fat cows."

"What Roman myth is it, then?" Emili said. (p. 215)

Are you KIDDING me? "What Roman myth is it, then?" And just in case you still think that this world-renown archeologist should be excused for her ignorance, perhaps on the basis of a secular upbringing, 50 pages earlier Emili quoted the Abrahamic covenant, citing Sunday school as her reference (p. 173). She must have been a very selective listener, both in Sunday school and in graduate school.

Oh, and she knows Latin well enough to read Ovid's erotic poetry (p. 39), but throughout the book, Marcus is constantly having to translate other Latin passages for her, such as "Phere Nike Umbilicus Orbis Terrarum" (p. 184), which I could pretty much get the gist of with just a couple years of high school French.

To me, this is all evidence of two things: lazy, sloppy writing, first of all; and second, it indicates that the author has a very low estimation of his readers' intelligence. Clearly Levin, a Harvard Law graduate and former visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, is not unintelligent. Therefore, I have to conclude that he thinks his readers are.

I know that a lot of the things I mentioned seem petty. And to be honest, there are a number of books that I enjoy which suffer from some of the same problems that I've mentioned above. However, in the case of The Last Ember, I didn't see anything to redeem these failings and make it worth my time as a reader.

★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ (2/10)

Content:

Blood and gore: Yes; nothing that you won't see in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, however.

Sex: There are a couple of sexual encounters referenced, but they are not descriptive and overall the sexual content is extremely mild.

Language: The F-word is used once. Otherwise the book is fairly clean.

The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall

Summary and review:

Vish Puri is the force behind India's "Most Private Investigators, Ltd.," an award-winning outfit that has solved the most baffling cases, from homicides to political intrigues to matrimonial stake-outs. Vish Puri is stout, has a carefully groomed and curled mustache, and is never to be seen without one of his tweed Sandown caps (his collection is imported from Jermyn Street in Picadilly), which pair beautifully with his new, always carefully pressed, gray safari suit. He is also clever, has stellar connections, loves disguises, and never fails to solve a case by using old-fashioned detective skills, persistence, and the art of deduction. But don't compare him to Sherlock Holmes, who, in Vish's opinion, merely copied the methods first set down thousands of years ago by Vish's guru, Chanakya, the Indian philosopher who established the art of investigation.

The Case of the Missing Servant is the first installment of what is to be a detective series by Tarquin Hall, a British journalist who has spent his career in south Asia. The case involves an honest public litigator is who is accused of murdering Mary, one of his family's servants who has mysteriously disappeared from his home. As nothing, not even Mary's last name, is known about the girl, this case stretches even Vish Puri's detective skills. At the same time, he is dealing with his overprotective "Mummy," an attempt on his life, his wife's insistence that he forgo delicious but artery-clogging Punjabi food, and a matrimonial case that is not as simple as it first appears.

Vish Puri is a great main character. More than a little sure of himself, he nevertheless seems to deserve the credit he gives himself, which makes him a sympathetic character, and his ego adds spice and humor to the novel. I loved the the nicknames given to characters in the book, Chubby, Tubelight, Facecream, and Flush. Although the plot was interesting and had a number of twists and turns, the book wasn't particularly suspenseful. I never feared for Vish or any of his compatriots, and I didn't know his client, Ajay Kasliwal, well enough to be overly concerned for what happened to him.

I've never been to India and don't know much about it, but this book makes me feel as if I've experienced it in all of its incarnations--fascinating, disturbing, colorful, raw, modern and traditional. There is an extensive glossary at the back of the book which includes words in Hinid, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and Nepali. The glossary was very interesting, and the use of the non-English words and terms definitely added to the atmosphere of the book; however it was distracting at times to have to flip to the back of the book to find a word's definition. ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ (6/10)

Content:

Blood and Gore: There are descriptions, though not graphic, of the murder victim's body

Sex: The missing servant may have been raped, and there are several sexual innuendos throughout the book, as well as mention of adultery.

Offensive Language: There is some blasphemy and "minor" swearing in English. In addition, the Punjabi equivalent of the f-word is used and then translated in the glossary.

In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff

Summary and Review:

Simon Ziele was working as a detective with the New York City police force when his fiance, Hannah, was killed along with 1,000 others in the General Slocum ferry disaster on the East River. In order to escape memories of the tragedy, Ziele transfers to a sleepy one-man police department in Dobson, a city located a few miles to the north.

However, only a few months after accepting the new position, Ziele encounters one of the most brutal murders of his career. A young woman is murdered in her bedroom in an upper-class portion of the city. To complicate matters further, Ziele is immediately contacted by Alistair Sinclair, a blue blooded academic who runs a criminology research lab at Columbia University. One of his "subjects," a psychopath named Michael Fromley has disappeared. And the murder in Dobson bears an uncanny resemblance to Fromley's style.

Although doubtful of Sinclair's motives, Ziele has to trust the researcher and his staff in order to discover the connection between Fromley and the murdered girl, and stop the killer from striking again.

I picked this book up from my library's "Readers' Choice Nominees" table. I've been unimpressed with some of the other nominees, but was pleasantly surprised with this pick. I haven't read a good detective novel in a long time, and it was a fun little diversion. I thought the book's biggest weakness was establishing the setting; despite Ms. Pintoff's obvious knowledge of the culture and history of the era, for some reason I never really felt like I was in turn-of-the-[last]-century New York. There were also a few places where the first-person narration was a bit clumsy. However, the book was engaging and exciting. It kept me guessing and was fun to read. I enjoyed the historical inclusions, such as Tammany Hall corruption, the steamship disaster, "yellow" journalism, and women's rights and the emancipation movement (I did not know, for example, that it was illegal for a woman to eat in a restaurant unaccompanied by a man). I also enjoyed learning about the early use of forensics (such as fingerprinting) and psychological profiling in criminal investigations. I'm looking forward to reading more by Stefanie Pintoff. ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ (6/10)

Content:

Blood and gore: graphic descriptions of murder scenes
Sex: mention of prostitution, non-explicit references to sexual violence
Offensive Language: slight, if any