The Last Templar – a seemingly interesting title. Even more so when the poster announced it would be the ideal present to place under a Christmas tree. The attracting advertising campaign evidently drew an eager reading public, when you take into consideration the fact that the book had been translated into a dozen languages.

The attractive advertisements would not have worked, however, without an interesting plot – detailing a young archeologist and FBI agent’s search for a lost codex, and their desperate attempts to outrun an unseen enemy. Their story unfolds in modern countries – Turkey, Greece, America and the Vatican – as well as in thirteen-century Europe. Reading the book, however, became a remarkably disengaging chore. The tone of the narration is rather dry, and the dialogue rather barren (not too dissimilar to reading a film script; Khoury being, incidentally, a scriptwriter and film producer.) Despite a rather dramatic and bloody opening, the novel’s action quickly unravels into a clumsy and poorly plotted historical mélange.

Perhaps the most fascinating elements of the book are, however, the historical facts described by Khoury. The author describes a search by the Templar Order for a lost artifact – a treasure, which would supposedly have destroyed Christianity itself. A comprehensive review of all of the facts and a confirmation of their validity would require much time. As in this new breed of ‘neo-historical’ novels, appearing of late in bookstores, the division separating fact and fiction becomes all too indistinct (See “Da Vinci Code,” of course.)