The righteous shall never be removed: but the wicked shall not inhabit the earth. . . .
While sitting with his father in a pew in St. Patrick's Cathedral, NYT reporter Will Monroe listens to the angelic strains of Handel's Messiah wafting through the church. On the other side of town, a pimp is stabbed to death.
The pimp is only the first. A militia extremist who donated a kidney is found dead. A teenager computer whiz is strangled in Mumbai, after letting loose a computer virus that will destroy porn sites. A doctor in South Africa is killed, just after discovering the cure for AIDS. A rich businessman in Bangkok is murdered...a man who spends his vast wealth to bury the poor with dignity.
Will Monroe follows his reporter's instincts and stumbles upon the links between in the first two deaths, which earns him a few enemies...ones that kidnap his wife to keep him quiet.
As the story unfurls and Will races to save his wife, the clues begin to point to the Hasidic community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Enlisting the help of his college sweetheart, and lead by anonymous Biblical text messages, they begin to crack the code of an ancient Jewish prophecy foretelling a version of Armaggedon. If 36 righteous men are killed, it will bring on the end of mankind. And someone somewhere is bent on setting that prophecy in motion. Time is ticking and the body count is rising...can Will and T.C. stop it?
The author may have done extensive research to throw this novel together but he expects you, the reader, to do the work for him by having a vast understanding of the interworkings of the Hasidic community and the kabbalah (no, not the idiotic Hollywood cultish version.) I do to a certain degree, but Average Joe Reader will be lost when the author fails to explain vital elements of the faith. The reader will also be out of luck without a familiarity of the Proverbs, since it plays an integral part in this race to break a simple code and save the world.
Not only is the writing shoddy, but the story is crippled by the hero, Will Monroe. He isn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, and needed a severe beating with a clue bat. At best, he comes across as yet another whining yuppie. At worst, he's sick to death over his kidnapped wife yet feeling up his ex-girlfriend not three pages later. Fortunately, the entertaining secondary characters are enough to carry the storyline or I would have stopped halfway into the book.
As for saving the world? The threat is far-fetched, the bad guys are obvious, and the ending predictable and anticlimatic. So 35 righteous men have died, but the rest of the world is saved just in the nick of time by a forward-thinking rabbi willing to violate Shabbat by using a computer. Rock on, sayeth I. Whatever it takes to speed up this nonsense.
In concept this is a fabulous tale. In far more capable and creative hands, it would have been stunning.
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Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins (August 22, 2006)
ISBN: 0061138290
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