Jon Land, The Last Prophecy

2004 may well go down as the year of the revisionist thriller. Well, not so much revisionist as imaginatively rethought. Witness the success of THE DA VINCI CODE or, more recently, THE RULE OF FOUR. But the best of this lot crammed with both originals and reissues may well be Jon Land's THE LAST PROPHECY.

Land's twentieth or so thriller, and his seventh to feature the crack investigative team of Palestinian Ben Kamal and Israeli Danielle Barnea, adds a measure of mythology to his well-honed mix in the form of the lost prophecies of none other than Nostradamus himself. One of these prophecies, it seems, is the only thing standing between the United States and a catastrophic terrorist attack, leaving Ben and Danielle in a race to decipher its meaning, thereby preempting the strike.

THE LAST PROPHECY opens in 1945 in the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald where an American medical evacuation unit finds a cache of documents hidden beneath a body-filled trench. Fast-forward to the present where the surviving members of that unit are being systematically murdered to prevent them from revealing what it was they found. Such intermixing of then and now follows the same formula as Dan Brown, but goes him one better by adding a contemporary crisis to the equation with far more than religious interpretations at stake.

THE LAST PROPHECY is better in every way than THE DA VINCI CODE. Served sizzling hot and packed with enough plot twists to send your pulse racing, this is the perfect book to save for a long summer vacation flight or wind-swept beach once you get where you're going. Don't forget your sunscreen, though, because once you start Land's latest there's no stopping.

The Last Prophecy

Jon Land

Forge, April 2004, $25.95, 384 pp.

ISBN 0765309696

She was the commander of the Israeli National Police but became persona non grata in the country she loved. Ben Kamal was a former Palestinian-American detective until he realized that nothing he could do could change the political climate. Unable to stomach the hopelessness of the situation and wanting to be with his exiled lover Danielle Barnea, they accept jobs in the safety and security service of the United Nations and live together in London.

They are sent to the Palestinian village of Bureij where almost a hundred residents including their United Nations teachers were massacred in what was made to look like an atrocity of the Israeli government. Ben learns that the killers were Iraqi Special Forces sent out of the country before the American led invasion. The target of the killings was the son of one of the men of the 121st Evacuation Hospital who was sent to Buchenwald who found four trunks under a mass grave. In the present, the remaining members of the 121st are being killed off one by one for what they know. Danielle and Ben soon uncover a plot that will make Sept 11 look minor.

Once again Jon Land delivers an action packed thriller that takes events from today's headlines and weaves them into a terrific story. Danielle and Ben are perfectly suited for their new jobs because they are citizens of the world since no country will claim them yet they fight to make the globe a safer place to live in. Though in many ways similar to previous tales in the exciting series, THE LAST PROPHECY is an outstanding one sitting reading experience.

Harriet Klausner