'What do you get if you cross Indiana Jones with Dan Brown? Answer: David Gibbins' Mirror
'What do you get if you cross Indiana Jones with Dan Brown? Answer: David Gibbins' Mirror
David Gibbins has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a PhD from Cambridge University he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada.
In Gibbins's sequel to Atlantis, marine archeologist Jack Howard searches for an ancient gold menorah seized by Vespasian's army during the sack of Jerusalem. While Jack and his team of scientists and historians follow clues from Istanbul and England to the Arctic, Canada and Mexico, a group of neo-Nazis (who have co-opted an organization as old as the Crusades and dedicated to the relic's safety) conspire to find and use the menorah to destabilize the world's religions. Stilted exposition, in which Jack details large chunks of history for colleagues who should already know it, mars an otherwise interesting backstory, and cardboard characters rouse little sympathy. Elsewhere, an overwhelming surfeit of detail serves at best to drag down the suspense, at worst to cause terminal confusion. Those with an already-strong sense of Roman, barbarian, Viking and English history, as well as those with a sincere desire to learn, will appreciate Gibbins's alternate history of King Harald Hardrada's defeat, if not necessarily the teacherly style or clunky adventure story in which it's couched. (Oct.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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