The Alexandria Link - Steve Berry (***)

The world is a poorer place for the sad and never satisfactorily explained disappearance of the Ptolemy's amazing library at Alexandria. With the possible exception of the current collections of the Library of Congress or the Vatican, the Alexandria Library was probably the greatest accumulation of the world's knowledge in history. And it's all gone. But Steve Berry has cleverly parlayed that germ of an idea, the missing library, into "The Alexandria Link", an entertaining if somewhat overwrought geo-political potboiler. The scion of the Alexandria Library, a sadly reduced but still priceless collection of scrolls, papyri and documents rescued from the original library, hidden in the Sinai desert and carefully guarded by a small group of guardians and librarians for over two thousand years is the subject of a winner-take-all, no-holds-barred search by the American, Israeli and Saudi governments as well as a shadowy right wing cabal of the world's wealthiest industrialists known as The Order of the Golden Fleece.

Thrillers like this need their heroes and Steve Berry has chosen to give centre stage to two returning characters, Cotton Malone, recently retired from the US Department of Justice and his ex-wife, Pam Malone. Admittedly, the notion of the good guys chasing around the world getting ever closer to their goal by solving impossibly obtuse archeological puzzles is getting somewhat stale as the reading public has been inundated with an endless string of "Da Vinci Code" copy-cats! The jury was in and out of the room on any number of occasions as I read through book but ultimately the verdict is that Berry pulled it off ... but just barely!

The basic premise of the entire story was, to give full credit to Berry, quite ingenious and thought-provoking. The proof of an inaccurate translation of certain passages of the Old Testament from Old Hebrew through Greek and Latin to modern English rests in the Alexandria Library under the stewardship of The Guardians. If the accurate translation surfaces, the tensions between the Islamic, Jewish and Christian faiths would erupt in such a fashion as to possibly set a spark to a tinder pile that could well ignite World War III.

"The Alexandria Link", unfortunately, is a hit and miss affair that never rises to the level of a truly compelling page-turner but, when you get to the last page, I think most readers would agree that it qualifies as enjoyable reading. First prize for characterization goes to Danny Daniels, the president of the USA, who unabashedly styles himself as "the leader of the free world" and is eminently comfortable with the awesome power his position embodies. In spite of that he somehow remains a very human, compassionate and even humorous character.