Sam Bourne, The Righteous Men

The Righteous Men

Sam Bourne

Harper Collins, August 2006, $24.95

ISBN: 0061138290

British expatriate Will Monroe is a reporter for the New York Times, who sees a nebulous link between two murders in which both victims were described as righteous by those who knew them; even Will assumes the deaths are a weird coincidence, but he digs a bit deeper. As more similar deaths occur that baffle police around the globe, Will follows the trail to Washington State.

However, while he is there, he receives an electronic message that his pregnant wife Beth has been kidnapped. He rushes home in a panic and realizes neither the police, or even his influential dad can help rescue his wife. Through a friend he learns the message came from an Internet caf in Crown Heights Brooklyn, home of the Hasidic Jews. Will goes there to try to find Beth, but he runs into trouble with the Rebbe who wonder who the outsider is working for. Soon the clues send Will searching for answers in the Torah, which begins to enable him to connect his spouse's abduction to the murders of THE RIGHTEOUS MEN; once the thirty-six are dead, life on this planet as we know it will end, but why Beth remains a mystery until Will completes the shocking circle that engulfs him.

Dan Brown meets Hasidic Jews in this somewhat convoluted religious End of Days conspiracy thriller that uses the Jewish Kabala as the focus. The storyline starts straight out with an interesting murder mystery, in which no motives seem to surface, and the only tie is that those killed were considered righteous. The tale soon spins into a wild all over the place religious thriller that is exciting, but also difficult to follow, with too many religious themes taken from the apocalypse to the messiah to the Kabala, etc. Still, this kosher Da Vinci tale is refreshing and very enjoyable, especially when the reporter crosses the Bay to Brooklyn.