Customer Reviews

The Righteous Men

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The author had a good basic plot, unfortunately our hero, Will Monroe Jr., is a totally unsympathetic character. Monroe comes across as a British version of a whining, spoiled yuppie. In one breath he is crying about the kidnapping of his wife Beth, the next he is admiring his ex-girlfriend's body. Please give me a break! Frankly, I was hoping Monroe Jr. would meet his demise somewhere along the way. You guess it, he makes it to the end just fine. You could also see who was behind murders of the righteous men, it could only have been one of two characters from the book. I hope Bourne can write a better leading character the next time around.

I read a lot of thrillers, and THE RIGHTEOUS MEN is probably the weakest I've read in quite a few months. This is an obvious knock-off of THE DA VINCI CODE, except it's nowhere near as good or well-researched.

The first part of this book plays out as a straightforward kidnapping story. Will Monroe is a reporter for the NEW YORK TIMES, and his wife has been abducted for reasons that are unknown to him. Since the kidnappers warn Monroe not to contact the cops, he investigates the kidnapping himself. His investigation leads him to a Hasidic Jewish community in Crown Heights, New York. This, in turn, leads him to discover a highly improbable conspiracy plot rooted in Jewish mysticism.

This book has a potentially interesting story, but it's severely handicapped by pedestrian writing and cardboard characters. The lead character, Will Monroe, is a clueless bore, and is downright unlikable when he makes a sloppy pass at his ex-girlfriend when his wife is still missing. Monroe hates himself for doing this -- so why should the reader feel differently?

Also, this plot is highly based on a series of highly unlikely coincidences. For example, what are the odds that Monroe's ex-girlfriend would happen to be an expert on the religious community that kidnapped his wife? Or that his best friend happens to be a brilliant computer expert who can track down the source of certain e-mail messages that Monroe receives? None of this is remotely believable. Even worse, it's not entertaining.

There are puzzles in this book, just like the Da Vinci code, but most of them are boring and have little relevance to the plot. Plainly, they were just thrown in this novel to capitalize on THE DA VINCI CODE and its success.

It's slapdash books like this that remind me how well constructed THE DA VINCI CODE really was. Avoid this one. There are much better thrillers out there that deserve your money.

Sam Bourne's The Righteous Men is a silly, ridiculously unbelievable tale of a young reporter's attempt to find his kidnapped wife and save the world from religious fundamentalists. The story is predictable (I guessed the "number one bad guy" from the first chapter), the hero is both banal and grossly shallow (he spends as much time salivating over his ex-girlfriend's body as he does worrying about his missing wife), and the writing is uninspired and ordinary. Well, that's not fair . . . Bourne DOES use a few rather amusing similes in his writing, such as this from page 258: "Will was pulled out of his hiding place like the meat from a sandwich." That one had me in stitches for a full two minutes!

Bottom line, Bourne insults both Jews and Christians equally, and he seems to know little about Hasidic culture or the Kabala that couldn't be learned in a fifteen minute Google search. The book's worst failing, I guess, is that there isn't one moment when this story is believable. Save your money . . . this one's not worth it.

*****THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW*****
Chew on this line from page 127 (paperback): "Will could feel the confusion in his own adrenal gland" He could? His adrenal gland has consciousness, and Will can perceive the mental state of this gland? Maybe it is confused because he only has one gland doing the work of the two adrenal glands that most people have. You know the old saying "Two adrenal glands are better than one."

Or think about this: on page 159, a character enters a room on "Saturday, 8:10 A.M." He is murdered mere moments later, and his killer then "stepped out into the night" on page 162. Then page 163 begins with "Saturday, 8:49 A.M.," both scenes refering to events in the Eastern Time Zone.

Or consider when our not-particularly-likable "hero" needs help from a computer whiz, it just so happens that his college roommate happens to be one. And when he needs information from a police officer, it just so happens that another college friend happens to be one, having conveniently risen through the ranks faster than almost anybody in the NYPD so he could be in a position to help out. Oh, this friend's life-long dream was to be a police officer, so of course he attended Columbia University, where they do not offer a degree in criminal justice. But even more convenient for our hero, when he needs someone with knowledge of the culture and traditions of Hassidic Jews, it turns out - unbeknownst to our hero - that his ex-girlfriend not only grew up in the Hassidic community that he needs to infiltrate, but she is also the ONLY female in the centuries-old history of this community to ever be educated in the deeper knowledge of the Hassidim, which had always been forbidden to women. How convenient.

And then there is his mysterious ally who sends coded messages along the way. How convenient is it that the guy just happens to be at the next desk. And no matter how you try to rationalize it, there is simply no reason whatsoever that this ally could not have simply arranged a private meeting for a whispered conversation that would have settled everything in five minutes. Or less. I wish I had put no more than five minutes into this book.

This was an exciting, intelligent thriller. My response to the many negative reviewers is that a prior knowledge of Jewish mysticism helps understand the premise of the novel. Having studied Jewish mysticism, I found the plot extremely plausible, and therefore much more frightening. I loved this book because I couldn't put it down, but also because of its unique premise. It also came across as very authentic, right down to the Yiddish words and phrases. A great, fun, enlightening reading experience.

I recently took this book for my airplane read on a transatlantic flight. In such circs, one can generally finish anything. Even Moby Dick. I couldn't finish this.

The book is advertised with the newest tag for any conspiracy theory yarn: "better than The DaVinci Code." (Really, Brown should get royalties for all the people who use his book as reverse publicity. ) OK, I didn't like The Da Vinci Code, finding it shallow, sexist, outrageously plotted and lacking in character development.

The Righteous Men is even worse.

Will Monroe, the hero, is - as reviewers here have already said - about as irritating a protagonist as I've come across: shallow, self-regarding, arrogant, not too bright. Yes, he has fits of self-criticism for one bit of behavior or another, but the number of unacknowledged acts of jerk-dom he perpetrates far over-shadows the behaviors he regrets.

The cover promises world travel; it must get packed into the last 80 pages, because Will goes only to the Pacific north-west and Brooklyn in the stuff I plowed through.

I read until page 354, but I have no idea what the conspiracy might be. Around page 100, Will decides that his ex-girlfriend is the only person who can help him rescue his kidnapped wife. Because she's Jewish, don't you know. Like all those people at the NYTimes, where he works. But he doesn't go to any of those Jews. Oh no. Just the one with the hot body and the blue-streaked hair.

In between daydreaming about the body parts of his ex, minimized by a name that's only initials, Will periodically goes wild thinking that the horrid Jews are going to kill - or worse - dear little Beth. There's no sane reason why they would kill her, but this is a real flash-back to those medieval tales where the wicked Jews' favorite hobby is randomly killing Christians, the cuter the better.

Two-hundred pages on, Will and TC are still playing footsie and working on an absurd number of word puzzles from a maybe-dead maybe-not Hassid in Brooklyn.

Sound boring?

Massively. Boring with a nasty little hint of anti-Semitism, despite Bourne's fulsome thank-yous on the acknowledgments page.

Buy Melville instead. Or even Dan Brown.

Picking it up at an airport (ok, so I have only myself to blame), the reviews on the cover looked quite good, promising strong plotline. However, it didn't take me long to get bored with a light stile of writing, a plot that never picks up speed (it just plain never gets going), and uninteresting characters. He works so hard describing Hasidic Jews in New York, but only makes it sound like he's trying too hard to make it interesting. Don't bother.

I don't usually read airport books- glossy covered thrillers splattered with blurbs that echo the urgency of a sideshow barker, and usually contain the words "roller-coaster ride"- but as I happed to be in an airport with a long flight ahead of me, I decided to condescend to the genre and chew on some mind candy for 6 hours. I was not too impressed.

First of all, the writing was mediocre at best. It wasn't as bad as Dan Brown's, but certainly well below what I expected from someone who went to Oxford and writes for the Guardian. The plot started off somewhat interesting- a couple of mysterious murders, a reporter's wife gets kidnapped- but it quickly devolves into a bizarre and unbelievably far-fetched story revolving around the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn and Talmudic legend. Almost imperceptibly, our protagonist finds himself allied with his wife's kidnappers, yet doesn't bother to demand her immediate release or even find out why she is being held. That nonsensical tidbit is revealed in the book's ridiculous climax, which I won't reveal. With a left-wing author with the name of Freedland, you can very easily guess who the real villains are. (no, not the Catholic Church- surprisingly enough- but close!) You can safely skip this one, unless you yourself are writing a book about cheesy religious thrillers that were written to profit off of the Davinci Code's success.

Since the "Davinci Code", several authors have attempted to pen novels based around obscure facts, speculations or concoctions from the past. Sam Bourne has done this with this book. Will Monroe is a New York Times investigative reporter who uncovers a plot to kill righteous men around the world. He becomes earnestly involved when his wife is kidnapped and held hostage. He investigations leads him to the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights in New York. As time runs out, Will enlists the help of former college mates to help him find out why these men are being killed.
This book is just good enough to keep you going, but let me suggest that you do not even start this book if you do not want to be disappointed.

I bought this because I wanted something to read on a long flight and the plot seemed interesting. But its so poorly written and drawn out that it fell apart on its own. I didnt give it one star because I did finish it (maybe I just wanted to say I gave it a chance. Pros are it flashes to the actual righteous men of the world getting killed one by one and their stories make you feel good and actually want to perform good deeds of your own. The cons are: he does such a poor job of expressing a husband looking for their kidnapped wife and his emotions. He has to write in that he is getting angry he can't find her, are you kidding me? And the whole ex girlfriend thing is ridiculous. He talks about her smell and their afternoons spent indoors about 40 times.
As for a spin off on da vinvi code, I dont really see any similarities at all. Including da vinci code was good and this was not.