Book review: The Last Ember
ByTitle: The Last Ember
Author: Daniel Levin
ISBN: 978-1-59448-872-6
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 418
Publisher: Penguin Group – Riverhead Books
Rating: 3 stars
From the cover flap:
Jonathan Marcus, a young American lawyer and a former doctoral student in classics, has become a sought-after commodity among antiquities dealers. But when he is summoned to Rome to examine a client’s fragment of an ancient stone map, he stumbles across a startling secret: a hidden message carved inside the stone itself. The discovery propels him on a perilous journey from the labyrinth beneath the Colosseum to the biblical-era tunnels of Jerusalem in search of a hidden 2,000-year-old artifact sought by empires throughout the ages.
As Marcus and a passionate UN preservationist, Dr. Emili Travia, dig more deeply into the past, they’re stunned to discover not only an ancient intelligence operation to protect the artifact, but also a ruthless modern plot to destroy all trace of it by a mysterious radical bent on erasing every remnant of Jewish and Christian presence from the Temple Mount.
With a cutting-edge plot as intricately layered as the ancient sites it explores, The Last Ember is a gripping thriller spanning the high-stakes worlds of archaeology, politics, and terrorism in its portrayal of the modern struggle to define–and redefine–history itself.
My thoughts:
I had a hard time deciding what to rate this book. In some ways I could give it a four but decided to go with a three. It is a very well-written book and I was impressed with the writing style but I had a really hard time staying connected with the story. Much of the storyline and plot were things that I’m just not very familiar with so it made it hard to follow. I found myself getting lost and wondering what was going on. Many books will have a heading when the characters change or the location changes so that the reader knows what’s going on and which characters are in focus at that point. This book didn’t do that and each time it switched it would take me a minute to figure out what was going on and what part of the story I was in. If you have any knowledge of the main topics of the book I think you’ll really like it. If not, it might be a little confusing.
