The final reckoning by Sam Bourne (book review)

The Final Reckoning by Sam Bourne

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I picked up this book from the shelf in the book shop I read on the cover the blurb, “The biggest challenger to Dan Brown’s crown.” Normally that would have been enough to make me put the book back on the shelf and look for something else, but I recalled that I had just read another book by Sam Bourne and it hadn’t been nearly as bad as anything written by Dan Brown, so I thought I’d take a chance on it anyway. It was remaindered and going cheap so I wouldn’t lose too much if it was a serious contender for Dan Brown’s crown as a writer of trash.

But the cover blurb certainly influenced the way I read the book — looking for comparisons with Dan Brown.

There are some superficial resemblances to The da Vinci code (the only Dan Brown novel I’ve read). The main characters are a man and a woman who meet and get hooked into travelling around ostensibly trying to solve a mystery together. Unlike Dan Brown’s characters, they have more believable professions — a doctor and a lawyer. And though it turns out that they are investigating a conspiracy, it is based on a real historical one, and not an imaginary bogus one.

Though the characters and many of the incidents in the story are fictitious, the historical setting is for the most part real. Like The da Vinci code, the story has several plot holes, but they are not as numerous and obtrusive as those in The da Vinci code. There are a couple of points at which the reader’s credulity is strained, a sort of “this kind of thing just doesn’t happen” moment, and then one thinks of former US President George Bush’s “extraordinary rendition”, and one realises that of course it does happen. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “Truth is always stranger than fiction, because fiction is a product of the human mind, and therefore congenial to it.”

I won’t say too much about the actual story, because of the danger of spoilers. A suspected terrorist is shot outside the UN headquarters in New York, but turns out to be an apparently harmless old man. Lawyer Tom Byrne, who formerly worked for the UN, is hired to offer hush money the victim’s family so they don’t make a fuss about it, but gets a crush on the victim’s daughter, which complicates things. It seems that shadowy people are looking for something that they suspect her father of having had, possibly his World War II memoir of persecution of the Jews and resistance movements against Nazi occupation, which the old man had been involved in.

The book also raises some moral issues about justice and the pursuit of vengeance. Is vigilante justice ever justified? When does the pursuit of justice cross the line and tip over into vengeance?

It’s not outstanding, but it’s quite a good read, and the tale is quite well told. In that respect, Dan Brown doesn’t come anywhere near challenging it.

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Hamas condemns the Holocaust

This article is unlikely to get much coverage in the Western media.

clipped from commentisfree.guardian.co.uk We are not engaged in a religious conflict with Jews; this is a political struggle to free ourselves from occupation and oppression But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality. And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us

Hat-tip to The Western Confucian.