BOOK REVIEW: Raymond Khoury's 'The Templar Salvation' Combines Explosive Secrets of Christianity with Today's 'War on Terror'
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
With two main characters returning from Raymond Khoury's 2006 best-selling thriller "The Last Templar", his sequel "The Templar Salvation" (Dutton, a member of the Penguin Group U.S.A., 405 pages, $26.95) has a parallel present-day couple in peril matched by a 14th Century Templar knight and the beautiful woman who's helping him rescue a literary treasure that could shake the foundations of Christianity.
It's an historical fact, but not one that Christianity is proud of: The treasure-seeking armies of the Fourth Crusade, distracted from their task of freeing Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Islam, lay siege in 1203 to the "Eastern Rome, " Constantinople, the seat of Eastern Orthodoxy. Templars infiltrated the imperial library seeking a cache of documents that must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Doge of Venice. They escape with three heavy chests, filled with explosive secrets that these men will not live long enough to learn.
Fast forward to 1310, with the remnants of the Templars, banned a few years before by the pope, attempt to locate the monastery in what is now Turkey where the wagon load of documents was taken. The remnants are soon only two: Conrad, the Knight Templar, and Maysoon, the Muslim woman who has chosen to be with him rather than with her cruel family. This is not a politically correct novel!
FBI agent Sean Reilly, an operative that would be unrecognizable to the real buttoned-down G-Men/Women, has infiltrated the Vatican library, specifically the Vatican Secret Archives of the Inquisition, to assist a man he soon discovers is the kidnapper of his love, archeologist/novelist Tess Chaykin, not the Iranian history professor whose family has been kidnapped. Reilly and the man he knows as Sharafi escape from the library with a document called the Fondo Templari, a secret history of the Templars that might have information on where the documents taken from Constantinople in 1310 are today.
Reilly's and "Sharafi's" escape from the Vatican is literally explosive, and the action never ceases until the book concludes. To reveal more of the plot would spoil it, but the characters are well-drawn and believable -- within the parameters of the religious thriller genre. It requires the necessary willing suspension of disbelief that a reader must practice with novels by Khoury and Dan Brown ("The Da Vinci Code" and "The Lost Symbol") and similar writers. I wouldn't be surprised if a film or TV version of "The Templar Salvation" were made: NBC made a two-part television miniseries of "The Last Templar" starring Mira Sorvino, Scott Foley, Victor Garber and Omar Sharif. It aired over two successive nights: Sunday, January 25 and Monday, January 26, 2009. It re-aired Sunday, May 31 and Sunday, June 7, 2009. I saw it on Amazon.com as a single-disc, 170-minute DVD.
As a history buff who's read many books about Freemasonry and protests against orthodox religious beliefs such as the Cathars, I found Khoury's book enthralling. If you want to learn more about how the Roman Catholic Church treated people who departed from the official doctrine, just Google "Cathars" or "Albigensians." Suffice it to say for now that the "crusade" against the peace-loving Cathars of France was the origin of the phrase "Kill them all, God will know his own."
About the author
Raymond Khoury was born in Lebanon in 1960 but spent his teenage years in Rye, NY, where his family moved in 1975 to escape the Lebanese Civil War. Khoury returned to Lebanon after his graduation from Rye Country Day high school to attend the American University of Beirut and study architecture. Khoury, who was raised Roman Catholic, now lives in London with his wife and two young daughters. In addition to writing novels, Khoury writes screenplays. His website: www.raymondkhoury.com