January 17, 2006

LLama Book Review

last templar.jpeg
The Last Templar, by Ray Khoury

Ray Khoury's The Last Templar is the ideal airport/airplane book, if by ideal you mean one that is guarenteed to scare off 99% of the population of potential seat mates from talking to you without arousing the threat matrix of airport security or the TSA.

Had Orenthal James Simpson not severed his wife's head and thereby, rather cruelly and unjustly, prematurely ended his cinematic career, he would have been the perfect actor to play the FBI partner to "Sean McGuinn" or "Dave McGuire" or whatever the name of the mamby-pamby conflicted Catholic Golden-Domer FBI super agent dude in charge of counterterrorism for the FBI's NY field office. By that I mean the serious OJ of his early career: the conflicted astronaut of Capricorn One, or the conflicted security guard of The Towering Inferno.

It's that good of a story.

What was fun for me was the inside joke reference to Umberto Eco's great novel Foucault's Pendulum, complete with Eco's assertion of the one truly reliable way to determine mental illness in someone is their eventually raising the topic of the Templars. With that as a marker thrown out at the very beginning, I was ready for a hip take down of Templar-inspired paranoia, with perhaps a little Dan Brown roasted on a stick. Alas, no such luck. The book wallows in Brown's vomit, but with a nice CSI-esque twist at the end, unfortunatly too late to redeem the rest.

There is a market there for a savage dark comedy take down of the whole Templar/Gnostic/Jesus was a chick genre---maybe I have to be the person to do it. Kind of a Stripes hijacks The Da Vinci Code sort of thing.

Posted by Steve at January 17, 2006 10:45 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Hey . . . I resemble that remark.

Posted by: The Colossus at January 17, 2006 11:36 AM

Mr. Llama, TEAR DOWN THIS TEMPLAR!

Posted by: Mike at January 17, 2006 11:43 AM

Careful, Steve. The Illuminati have ways to deal with those who would mock their role as the Secret Masters of World History. Look what they did to Hudson Hawk.

Posted by: utron at January 17, 2006 11:55 AM

This is twice in as many days that you have mentioned Capricorn One. I'm starting to worry about you, Steve.

Posted by: jen at January 17, 2006 11:57 AM

Great review! Can't wait for your novel.

Posted by: Chai-rista at January 17, 2006 12:42 PM

But how will you get the EM50 inside the Louvre?

Posted by: tee bee at January 17, 2006 05:49 PM

Disguised as a hot dog cart, but of course.

I'm thinking of titling it, "Jesus was a Lesbian, and other true facts the Templars have been protecting and the Pope would kill us if we knew too"

Posted by: Steve the LLamabutcher at January 17, 2006 07:50 PM