Customer Reviews

The Coptic Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I loathe spoilers so I will try not to include any.
This is the first Loomis and Lang Reilly ( Obviously ) book I have read.

I really do not see where all the other reviewers on this site are coming from. Based largely on the glowing endorsements here I purchased this book last week and read it in two days. I read alot and this type of book is within my normal realm of recreational reading. However, I have found this book to not really be very good. The plot was pretty transparent and the supposed twists and turns were rather lacking. Maybe it had more to do with me coming into the series at the tail end but alot of the characters were rather stale feeling as well.

I usually have no problem suspending my disbelief and letting things slide in many movies and books because I accept that they are largely here to entertain and most people do not want to immerse themselves in the doldrums' of daily life, but I was hard pressed not to find many situations in this book hard to swallow. The "Old Flame" that was introduced in the book never felt very real and the incompetence of the "bad guys" was pretty bad if you took even a moment to think about it. Friends and neighbors would come from out of the blue to save him and federal judges would be on the exact same page as the main character. It was hard to really see any competent opposition against the main character for the entire book.

After reading the book I started looking for other reviews of the book online and did not find much evidence out there that people have read this. Of the few that had none of them rated it an equivalent 5 out of 5.

I do not know what the other reviewers were actually reading but this book was nowhere near 5 star material and I will not be reading anything else by this author.

I like most of Gregg Loomis' books but this one felt like it was "phoned in". The main character (Lang Reilly) jumps from one location to another without explanation. Police after him? No problem, he is on a flight home. Blew up a building? No problem, he is on a flight home. No passport? On a flight home!

The story also jumps around, sometimes from one paragraph to another, with little concern for the reader following along. It is almost as if Mr. Loomis is just concerned with giving the reader the highlights, not to be bothered with the flow of of the storyline. Maybe it was the lack of story that forced Mr. Loomis to fill the book with random violent events, thus making the whole book a choppy read.

I hope Mr. Loomis takes more time on his next book so that reading his work becomes an enjoyable experience again.

I usually read Loomis' books in the first few days after release but I held this one for a trip to the beach. This book needs a dermatologist's warning label. I was so engrossed in the book I lost track of time and actually came away with a sunburn. After his last 4 books, Lang Reilly and Father Frances have become my good friends. Loomis takes what was thought to be long settled historical theology and blows it open with words of intrigue found in long forgotten documents that were actually discovered in the mid 20th century in Egypt. A zealot Roman Catholic organization has good reason to keep the documents secret and that provides the perfect springboard for Lang Reilly to re-enter the world of global intrigue through a series of action packed globetrotting adventures. If this book gets to the Vatican, there is no doubt Loomis' name will be found on the rolls of heretics proclaimed every Maundy Thursday (and I suspect he'd enjoy that). It is fiction but it will cause windows in Rome to rattle. Loomis' description of places in the U.S. and Europe leads one to believe he has actually stood in each of them. This is his best work yet and a must read.

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

This book is so boring and unbelievably long in spinning a 2-page story, that I found myself skipping pages and not missing a beat. Guess what ... There aren't many !!!
I'd picked up the book after reading most of the glowing reviews here, but how I kicked myself for not reading the really critical ones. Please do yourselves a huge favor and do not buy or read this.

Other reviews of 2 or 3 stars really say it all so I won't repeat. But....what the heck is the authors problem with Home Depot? Totally irrelevant to this lackluster attempt.

Overall I was somewhat disappointed with this book. The plot was thin. Seemed like too much filler vs too little substance. Did I really need a whole page related to the stewardess making him a cup of coffee - when that's all it was, no subplot lead in, etc.. As a previous reviewer mentioned, all of the adversaries were seemingly incompetent. The child aspect actually detracted from the story in my opinion. The book did have its good moments, but the book was just not a complete package. I really don't think his heart was in this story. I enjoyed the previous books.

I won't spoil it for you, but this one is a must for Loomis fans. Lang Reilly is back, and again his peaceful existance is disturbed. I went into reading this one full of hope, and was not disappointed. Gregg Loomis is at the top of his craft with this one. Well done. A must for any Loomis/Lang Reilly fans.

I have enjoyed all of Gregg Loomis' books and this is no exception. Some compare it to the Dan Brown genre but I like these better. His protagonist, Lang Reilly is fun and has the life we all want but this is fiction folks. I enjoy his escapades and the fine job Loomis does in taking on subjects that require much research. This book is maybe not his best but it is a great read and I promise you will have a hard time putting it down. Plus, you might just learn something from the history he has come to life.
Definitely worth your money.

Once again, Gregg Loomis keeps you on the edge of your seat with this new addition to the Lang Reilly adventures. The detail and flash backs to previous works really keeps you in the game. I love it.