Book Review — Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar”

The other day I finished reading Raymond Khoury’s mystery / adventure story, The Last Templar.

Set in both modern and ancient times, The Last Templar readers follow along as a daring art museum robbery turns into a quest to seek a religious artifact important enough to literally change the world overnight.

Raymond Khoury --- The Last Templar

The story begins in 1291 after the Ninth Crusade as the Holy Land is falling to the Muslims.  A couple of Knights Templar are fleeing the besieged city, carrying with them a mysterious chest.  Their ship sails into a terrible storm and vanishes.

Jumping ahead to today, the main part of The Last Templar begins in New York City at the Metropolitian Museum of Art.  It’s the night of the big unveiling of an exhibition full of Vatican artifacts.  It’s also the night where four people dressed as Knights Templar storm the event while on horseback, using broadswords and Uzi light machine guns to kill and terrorize the crowds.  The attacks make off with an ancient encryption device, leaving a trail of death and casualties in their wake.

Caught in the middle of the attack is Tess Chaykin, an archaeologist who happened to be attending the exhibition along with her daughter and mother.  Tess is a key witness to the events, and it’s by witnessing a key action that takes her levels of curiosity deeper and deeper into the mystery of the attack, ultimately taking her halfway around the world in a race against time.

Teamed up with Tess is FBI agent Sean Reilly, a veteran of the force and assigned with bringing the museum attackers to justice.  Agent Reilly seeks Tess’s help with her knowledge of the time period and connections within the archeological society.  Naturally, Agent Reilly escorts Tess as she travels out of the country in pursuit of the mysterious item, and the two fight enemies and solve puzzles along the way.

But is The Last Templar any good?

As a story, The Last Templar is an easy read filled with almost every cliche in modern literature.  There’s nothing new or to get excited about with Khoury’s style of writing.  The characters are boring, the FBI agent is too stereotypical, and there are numerous plot holes throughout the novel.  Unless you have a complete fascination with medieval warfare and the Knights Templar, there’s not a whole lot to get excited about in The Last Templar.

And then there’s the whole debate as to whether Khoury was intentionally being anti-Christian, or if this was just a way to keep the story moving.  There’s nothing wrong if one does so for the sake of telling a fictional story, but when controversial issues are presented as facts and defended as such, that’s when people get really upset.  Personally, I’m not a biblical scholar by any means, but I did find Khoury’s writing interesting enough to look up information myself and attempt to sort fact from myth.

The Last Templar has two endings.  Up first is the lame and cliched that you expect from a story such as this one.  The last two pages has a second ending that turns around everything in the story.  It’s the kind of ending that I’m sure was expected to blow people away, but the generally lame and stereotypical writing style along with controversial issues ruin the big build up.

Ominous sign #1

The front cover of The Last Templar and many Internet review sites compare this story with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.  When people make a point of comparing this book to an older novel, you know that this style of writing is not going to be original.  This doesn’t mean that the actual story can’t be any good, but rather you’ll get a really familiar feeling when reading this book, whether it’s desired or not.

Ominous sign #2

Before the story begins, an ominous quote by Pope Leo X leads us readers to believe that the events surrounding Jesus Christ are a myth.  This goes hand-in-hand with the terrible “secrets” about the Knights Templars and an even grander conspiracy in the story involving the Catholic church.  The “quote” by Pope Leo X (is it even a direct quote?) already tells you ahead of time that devout Christians may not want to waste their time with such a novel.

The Last Templar is an easy read.  It took me about two weeks to read the story, and that was at a casual pace.  The chapters are extremely short, and with the simple plot lines it wasn’t any trouble following the story and (correctly) predicting the general outcome.  Despite the opening action sequences (in both ancient and modern times), don’t expect a whole lot of action in this adventure story, either.

This is also a book best enjoyed if you turn off your brain.  No disrespect to the author, but The Last Templar is certainly not a “smart” thriller by any means.  It’s also full of the usual cliches commonly found throughout today’s adventure / thriller books.  That style of writing isn’t necessarily bad, but it does become boring quickly.

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These reviews and much more are available at my other website, Chamber of Reviews!