The Coptic Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers)
by Gregg Loomis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gregg LoomisEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-06
ISBN: 0843962747
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Leisure Books
Book Reviews of The Coptic Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers)
Book Review: A book that Timothy McVeigh would have loved
Summary: 1 Stars
WARNING: To anyone who might take this book seriously, there are spoilers coming up.
I find myself in agreement with Amazon reviewer R. B. McCord on most things, except for his over-generous rating of two stars.
As with Mr (Ms?) McCord, this was my first and very definitely my last encounter with the works of Gregg Loomis. I read through "The Coptic Secret" in one long session, led by very much the same forces that compel one to stare at a train wreck. Great heavens, this book was so awful that it might well have been written by that Bozo who perpetrated "The Da Vinci Code". Yes, it's that appalling!
How is this book so awful? Let me count the ways:
THE VILLAINS. I have no connection with the Catholic Church. If anything, my family consists of hard-shell, tea-totaling Methodists of the very direst sort. Nevertheless, I find this currently fashionable sniping away at the Church of Rome and all its works to be distasteful in the extreme. I ask you, the Knights of Malta as a sinister organization? Give me a break!
THE KVETCHING. Oy, Lang Reilly, the hero (for want of a better word), doesn't seem to care for the way that food is prepared for him--except for some ham and red-eye gravy served up in a backwoods shack, of course--and he NEVER fails to stop the narrative dead in its tracks to complain about what is set before him, again and again. Reilly also doesn't hold a high opinion of governments, any legal system, police agencies, policeman and a whole lot of other stuff, all with the same result.
THE CHARACTERIZATIONS. Let's see now, Reilly is a fellow of humble origins who became an analyst with the CIA rather than the operations man he wanted to be (with a kvetch about that, of course), although he did go on one clandestine and apparently bloody operational adventure. He quit the Agency, put himself through law school to become a hotshot Atlanta lawyer who specializes in defending white-collar and high-paying criminals. And he has parlayed that and some sort of insurance settlement arriving from the death of his wife and child into some sort of international do-gooder fund of which he is the head, and for which he jet-sets around the globe in what amounts to his own Lear jet. From all this we can conclude he is a man well into middle-age, a man in middle age, that is, who just happens to have the physical skill set of Jason Bourne. Oh yeah, I can believe it, sure....
Reilly has a girlfriend, a former defector from the DDR who became an operational agent with the CIA and who, naturally, also has a Bourne-like skill set. She's the kind of woman who gets pregnant from an earlier affair with Reilly and who withdraws from him without letting him know of his impending fatherhood because ... well, because. And she's the kind of woman who turns up unexpectedly with the kid in tow, keeping said child at the bullseye of ground zero because .... er, well, because. Yeah, sure.
There is the ex-Mossad agent who is equally skillful at creating and defusing bombs, the one that just happens to be on the spot at exciting moments? Hey, why not?
And the Catholic priest, Reilly's good buddy who doesn't tell him things, all for Reilly's own good, of course.
And the lethal little toad with the filed-down teeth who hops around in dimly-lit basements and dark alleys? And the Grandmaster of the Knights of Malta, for Pete's sake, who refers to himself and his top minions by cutesy names and who runs his organization like a branch of James Bond's old nemesis, SPECTRE?
Tsah!
THE SNOBBERY. At regular intervals, Reilly speaks in Latin tag-ends, apparently to let all of us unwashed groundlings realize his intellectual superiority. That neither Reilly nor author Loomis know the difference between Demosthenes and Diogenes makes the gaff all the funnier.
THE MCGUFFIN. The Coptic secret of the title is a gnostic gospel that puts St Peter in a bad light in relation to St James. This is supposed to be so horrifying a thing that it generates all sorts of bloodshed. So, big deal. Not one character in the book ever stops to consider that the Gnostics were the very definition of nut cultists and that their literary materials are nothing more than nut cult artifacts--at least for the vast majority of everyday Christians.
THE ATTITUDE. Reilly is a cowboy in the worst possible sense of the word who has no use for law or institutions. He must do everything for himself because he is smarter and morally superior to ... well, everybody and everything. In the very first scene, he rushes off unarmed in pursuit of murderous thugs armed with automatic weapons. It needs hardly be said that he he brings one of them down--with a spear, of all things! In so doing, he finds a clue which may lead to the rest of the thugs as well as to a kidnapped victim. As a morally superior being, Reilly hides this from the intrinsically incompetent police and sets off in righteous pursuit, all by himself.
This pursuit sends him like a ping-pong ball back-and-forth, back-and-forth from Europe to the US to Europe to western Asia to ... wherever, until he gathers information enough for mere mortal and morally inferior readers to infer that certain unspecified members of the nefarious band (in this book, anyway) of Knights of Malta MIGHT possibly be guilty. Does he call the cops? No. Blow the whistle to the media? Nah. What does he do? Why, as a morally superior character, he takes the Timothy McVeigh choice: he calls in his ex-Mossad friend and he blows up the Priory and EVERYBODY in it.
Sheesh, why doesn't Amazon have a zero-star rating?
LEC/Am/12-09
Summary of The Coptic Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers)
A murder at the British Museum sends Lang Reilly racing across the globe in search of a previously unknown Gospel?while a mysterious organization will stop at nothing to prevent him.
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