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 Killer's Cousin by Nancy Werlin

Summary and review:

David Bernard Yaffe is embarking on a second attempt at finishing his senior year. His first senior year was stalled when he was accused of killing his girlfriend, Emily. Although he has recently been acquitted, the memory of Emily's death and the sensationalism of the trial are too fresh in the minds of David's Baltimore community, so he moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with his uncle's family and finish school. Cambridge, however, is not free from complications. David's Uncle Vic and Vic's wife Julia aren't speaking to each other; there is something seriously wrong with Lily, their 11-year-old daughter, who resents David's intrusion into her life and embarks on a campaign to drive him out; On top of it all, David is staying in the attic apartment which, until four years previously, was occupied by Kathy, Vic and Julia's eldest daughter. Kathy is dead, but she still haunts the Shaughnessy family.

David is the book's narrator; the story follows him as he tries to manage the guilt he feels over his role in Emily's death, but, as the book's title seems to imply and as David's prologue states, the story is about Lily. Lily is haunted by her sister's death, and deals with her emotions by attempting to manipulate and control those around her. David's arrival throws her world into disarray, but it may also give her the chance to finally come to grips with what happened that day.

I was surprised by how creeped out I was at times while reading The Killer's Cousin. It's a thoughtful, well-written book that explores grief, forgiveness, family, and guilt, but it's also extremely suspenseful, and exhibits characteristics of thrillers and supernatural-type books. Lily in particular is creepy. If I were David, knowing that Lily was lurking around my apartment would be much more disturbing than anything else that could be hanging around.

I felt that the big mystery which was revealed towards the conclusion of the book was kind of obvious, however, I don't really have a problem with that. In many ways, anticipating the horror David would feel upon discovering the truth actually increased the suspense I felt while reading.

Although The Killer's Cousin deals with some extremely weighty topics and is a very sad book overall, it ends on a hopeful, redemptive note. The ending was satisfying, giving the characters a fresh start, and left me feeling positive. ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ (7/10)

Content:

Blood and Gore: No graphic descriptions are given, but the book explores the deaths of two young women.

Sex: Again, no descriptions are given, but sex is mentioned multiple times in relation to several characters.

Language: The language is mild throughout the entire book, and then all of a sudden the F-word, used in a sexual context, is thrown in.

The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer

Summary and review:

For years, Milo Weaver was "a tourist"--a black ops agent for the CIA. His handler, the only man he trusted, was God, and, like the most fervent believer, Milo carried out orders without hesitation or question, no matter what was required. He had no name, no home, no family, and no past. Eventually, however, the life of tourism begins to take its toll. By 2001 Milo is hooked on amphetamines and weary of the endless cycle of new orders, foreign cities, and dead bodies, and he attempts suicide during a mission. The attempt fails, and immediately Milo is given another assignment, which he accepts with a weariness and resignation born of exhaustion mingled with long years of unquestioning obedience. This next mission, however, gives Milo the resolve to do what he has long been unable to do--retire. In Venice, with a near-fatal gunshot wound leaking blood from his chest, gripping the hand of a laboring pregnant woman, with the broken form of a young girl on the cobblestones beside him and the body of a former-colleague-turned-traitor a few yards away, Milo makes the decision to leave the world of tourism.

2007 finds Milo living in Brooklyn, with a name and a permanent address. He is no longer a field agent, having traded in his former life for a desk job, a wife, and a daughter. He is happy in his new life, but is brought back into the field when one of his closest friends is implicated in a plot against the United States. By accepting the new assignment, Milo descends back into the world of black-ops CIA. This time, however, Milo is a different type of tourist; no longer willing to work on blind obedience, Milo uncovers previously unseen elements of lies, manipulation and betrayal in his old cases and soon finds himself on the run.

I really enjoyed this novel. It reminded me a little bit of The Bourne Identity (the movie; I've yet to read the books)--extremely suspenseful with tons of twists. There were multiple times when I thought that Milo (and I) had figured out who the "bad guy" was, only to find out that there was someone else holding the strings. And The Tourist wasn't just some shoot-em-up James Bond-type story where the protagonist sleeps with the girl and shoots a bunch of people and asks questions later. Milo Weaver was a government-hired assassin with a conscience. It was really interesting to imagine the psychological ramifications that a "career" like this could have on a person, and I'm glad Steinhauer included passages where Milo struggled with what he left behind him in the wake of an assignment.

My biggest complaint about the book was the way Steinhauer used September 11 to bookend Milo's story. Milo's Venice assignment, the one that resulted in his retirement from Tourism, happened on September 11, 2001, and the book ended six years later on September 11, 2007. I couldn't figure out why Steinhauer decided to use this date, and it really bugged me. There were a few asides about the way the CIA changed after 9/11, and Milo complained a few times about post-9/11 airport security, but having the action take place on September 11 didn't further the plot in any way that I could see. I kind of think Steinhauer, who, as an American living in Hungary publishing novels with an American publisher, has probably enduring more than his share of post-9/11 flights, was annoyed with the airport security himself and thought it would be clever to title the Venice section "The End of Tourism."

Regardless, that's a pretty minor complaint. The book ends with a gigantic cliffhanger, so I suspect that we'll be seeing more of Milo Weaver, and I'm looking forward to it. ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ (7/10)

Content:

Blood and gore: There are a lot of people getting shot, poisoned, thrown off balconies, and stabbed with HIV-infected shards of metal in this book. Be warned.

Sex: There are no sexual encounters described in this book. There are, however, two references to sexual abuse of children. While absolutely no details or descriptions are given, it is still a pretty disturbing.

Language: Bad. In addition to the usual suspects, the f-word is also used quite a few times.