Oh deary me. It had such promise. A trilogy (this being the first) telling the story of the founding, flourishing & sudden decimation of the Templar knights sounded like a rip-roaring tale. How very wrong. At 548 pages, this is easily twice as long as it needed to be. He gets badly sidetracked into long conversations and descriptions that don't advance the story any. The characters are a bit one dimensional and I'm fairly sure he gets confused as to who is where and related to whom at various points along the way. And then he felt the need to invent some ridiculous secret order that are from Christian families, but claim a direct line of descent from a bunch of Jewish priests exiled from Jerusalem in the first century. Really? And then, towards the end, there's an Egyptian temple connection - all highly improbable. The pages and pages and pages of hocus pocus that got spouted about reforming the church and how the secret order would change the world were really not worth the effort. I haven't read such tosh since Dan Brown. Put it this way, no way am I seeking out volumes 2 & 3.
