Book Review – The Sacred Cipher

The Sacred Cipher by Terry Brennan – (2009) – Hidden inside a sealed room in New York’s historic Bowery Mission is a cipher that promises to threaten the stability of the world even after centuries.  An unlikely band of experts will gather in Jerusalem to try and find the truth.  Assuming they can find it before  they are killed by one of the several groups who are chasing them, determined to keep the secret safe.

This is the kind of book I am guaranteed to pick up.  I love the Dan Brown books and the Indiana Jones movies.  Take some historical fact and then spin a wonderful story around it and you’ve got me hook, line and sinker.   So I opened this one with great anticipation.

Brennan draws on a wonderful array of history including the Rosetta Stone, Charles Spurgeon, Edward Elgar and the Dorabella Cipher, and the Bowery Mission itself (where Brennan worked for several years).  It felt like we were really going to have some fun.

The problem is that Brennan doesn’t seem to know when to say “enough”.  We get one thing piled onto the next onto the next.  That includes the obligatory beautiful young female character and the somewhat more surprising small person character who is in love with her.  There’s not one, not two but three different groups not only chasing our merry band of would be Indiana’s.  All of them trying to kill our heroes.

Brennan also tries to sneak a little “Christian literature” into the story as well.  It’s not overwhelming but it’s really cheap since he isn’t willing to commit (Brown offers more in depth theological discussions) and delve into the issues.  The very strong feeling I got was that someone thought the world needed a “DaVinci Code” aimed at a Christian audience.  That comes up short on both the thriller and faith literature standards.  Either go for it or don’t.  This halfway attempt left me (a practicing Christian and confessed genre fan) cold.

At the end we are offered a fairly ridiculous and unlikely ending where all the troubles in the Middle East just sort of miraculously disappear.  Yes, it would take a miracle to pull this off.  The book doesn’t bother to provide it.

So what we’re left with is a really great concept, some fair to middling story telling and a bit of a muddle otherwise.  After starting with such high hopes I came away disappointed.  There’s just enough here to make worth having around for one of those slack periods where you can’t find anything really good to read.

Rating – *** Worth A Look