Name: Sign of the Cross
Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780141030845

Chris Kuzneski

A Vatican priest is found murdered on the shores of Denmark. He is the first victim in a vicious killing spree that spans the world.

Sign of the Cross

While a vicious killer targets Vatican priests around the world, leaving his victims hanging on a cross, an archaeologist discovers a scroll that could shake the foundations of Christianity. Original.

Tim Pendry

Although, like so many of these thrillers, it falters towards the end as everything has to get tied up without too many loose ends, this is one of the better contributions to the conspiracy/thriller genre in terms of straight simple story telling. It precedes Sword of God as a Payne/Jones actioner and, although the second is better in writing, plotting and, dare one even contemplate the term, credibility, this is a good read, simply because Kuzneski does not try to be over-educated to his audience. His explanations of events (far from reliable but who cares) are short and to-the-point without those long boring serious passages where lesser mortals try to persuade us that they read the Vatican Library as part of their research. Kuzneski just wants to entertain us and the only things that you might need warning about is that it has its gruesome moments (but much less so than the sequel) and there are many points when he would have been burned by the inquisition for blasphemy - certainly not a comfortable book for evangelicals and opus dei catholics. Kuzneski seems blithely unaware that he is tampering with stuff that can get you killed in many countries - and his next book does to Islam (though more charitably) what he does to Catholicism in this one. What next - a story about a group of Buddhist killers, 'Jews for the apocalypse' or Shinto world domination? Kuzneski has the chutzpah ...

Sign of the Cross

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