OMG! (As any of my grand-daughters would say.) I can not believe I had this on my bookshelves for two years before I read it! I love this book! It is not for everyone. The history is THICK. But the writing is wonderful, the story complicated - so I did not figure it out in the first half as I usually do - and the characters were unusual but believable. This book was originally written in Spanish but is about an Italian family. Yes, that is what I said. And Dante's Divine Comedy is what holds the clues to the whereabouts of the artifacts for which they are searching.
'They' are Dr. Octavia Salina, a nun, who is a paleographer for the Vatican, asked to decipher the tatoos and markings on the body of an Ethipian man recently killed in a plain crash, her helper (Keeper?) Kaspar Glauser-Roist, from the Pope's Swiss Guard and an Egyption Archeologist, Farog Boswell. Before long, the three find themselves tracking an acient order called the Staurofilakes, sworn to protect the True Cross of Christ. And this order is now stealing all the peices of the cross that have been kept in various religious sites around the globe. Soon Octavia, Kasper and Farog are jumping around the world, in and out of danger, tracking these Staurofilakes.
I had to think while reading this book, but I enjoyed that. You might also need to like, or appreciate, history to truly 'get-into' reading The Last Cato. It has been compared to The Da Vinci Code, but I did not think it was much like it. Written before Dan Brown's novel, I think it is a much better book. For me, this is just the type of read I crave.
Asensi has one other book that has been translated into English and I am hot on its trail . . .
'They' are Dr. Octavia Salina, a nun, who is a paleographer for the Vatican, asked to decipher the tatoos and markings on the body of an Ethipian man recently killed in a plain crash, her helper (Keeper?) Kaspar Glauser-Roist, from the Pope's Swiss Guard and an Egyption Archeologist, Farog Boswell. Before long, the three find themselves tracking an acient order called the Staurofilakes, sworn to protect the True Cross of Christ. And this order is now stealing all the peices of the cross that have been kept in various religious sites around the globe. Soon Octavia, Kasper and Farog are jumping around the world, in and out of danger, tracking these Staurofilakes.
I had to think while reading this book, but I enjoyed that. You might also need to like, or appreciate, history to truly 'get-into' reading The Last Cato. It has been compared to The Da Vinci Code, but I did not think it was much like it. Written before Dan Brown's novel, I think it is a much better book. For me, this is just the type of read I crave.
Asensi has one other book that has been translated into English and I am hot on its trail . . .
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