I love free Kindle books, but like any book you never know what you're going to get. I enjoyed this one, but it probably was best as a freebie. The two problems I had with this fun, exciting, action-packed book were pretty common in today's entertainment: 1. gratuitous sex, and 2. not enough meat to make the archaeology believable.
The sex part basically takes this from the realm of being able to be recommended by me. I love to read escapist thrillers about Biblical artifacts, but like with most fluff novels, there always has to be a love interest. Amazing how every time someone faces a crisis, they have to either have a torrid love affair or find their soulmate. Sometimes yes that happens in real life, but not always. Making the affair explicit and taking up plenty of pages describing it, though, takes away from it, to me.
The other part concerns the archaeology. The Voynich Manuscript is a very real artifact from the Middle Ages, one of the most mysterious religious writings in history, still undecoded. Learning about it was a lot of fun, but then the mystery kind of goes nowhere at the end. How many novels have been written since The da Vinci Code that have tried to debunk Jesus' resurrection? Far too many. I remember reading Steve Berry's The Templar Legacy and loving the book but being disappointed in yet another group of scientists finding Jesus' bones. Well, here we go again.
That would put this book into the classic "debunking Christianity" category, except for the twist that the bones in question are described as having human, but not quite human DNA. Does that mean this author believes Jesus was someone special, someone unexplainable, someone divine? Then why write a story about someone finding His bones?
How many great preachers, evangelists, writers and theologians does it take to remind us of how important Christ's resurrection is to the entire Christian story? Without the resurrected Christ, there is no story. I really enjoyed reading this page-turner, but I wish this author believed in the resurrected Christ. His story would have been that much better. A better book would be A Skeleton in God's Closet, by Paul L. Maier, which was not only a better mystery but also a very Christian novel.
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