Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If You Liked the Da Vinci Code, this is a Decent Choice, October 16, 2006
I had really mixed feelings about this novel. I recommend it, with some major reservations.
On the one hand, SIGN OF THE CROSS has a remarkably ambitious and inventive plot. It is similar to THE DA VINCI CODE in that sense. Like Dan Brown, Mr. Kuzneski has done a great deal of research on alternative histories of Christianity. He does a very decent job weaving much of this historical research into the storyline. By reading this novel, I learned a lot of interesting facts about the Christian religion, as well as Roman history.
This novel, like the DA VINCI CODE, is very fast paced and contains a number of exciting action scenes that are well done. This novel also takes place in a variety of countries, like Denmark, Libya, China, Italy, Thailand and the United States. The chapters are relatively short, and this novel is hard to put down once you get started. This book also has a relatively good climax -- there is a major revelation at the end of this novel that I thought was highly creative.
The major flaw of SIGN OF THE CROSS is the characterization and dialogue. There are too many characters in this book, and Kuzneski keeps switching the perspective from character to character. As a result, no single character is fully fleshed out, and many characters comes across as little more than cardboard cutouts that rush from one action scene to another. Some of the supporting characters are downright cartoonish. Also, much of the dialogue in this novel is rather stilted and kind of clunky.
I must also admit that I didn't really care for Jonathon Payne, one of the "heroes" of this book. Payne is supposed to be a good guy, but has few qualms about using extremely violent tactics (i.e. torture) to achieve his goals. Payne is also a bit too invulnerable and superhuman for my tastes, more of a bland action hero than a real human being.
As a result, I felt very little emotional engagement in the story since I didn't feel very much sympathy for any of the characters. If Kuzneski had made his characters more three dimensional and vivid, this could have been a genuinely great novel.
Overall, though, I was impressed enough with the plot of this novel to recommend it. I think Kuzneski has exceptional plotting and research skills, but he needs to work more on his dialogue and characterization. If he does that, he could become the next Dan Brown or Steve Berry.
Three and a half stars.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Calculated Error..., January 17, 2007
I did not like this book and it is my own fault for succumbing to curiosity; I did not see how anything could be new on the topic after DA VINCI CODE and Kathy Reich's BREAK NO BONES....
The subject of whether Christ died on the cross or not has been stirred too many times and no real thinker will buy these suppositions anyway.
But while the author is gripping in his descriptives of the crimes ( i.e: crucifictions, helicoptor crashes, etc) that seems to be his only forte.
He gives in to name dropping, mentioning Stephen King and Dan Brown for example, as if to alert us that he knows his story has been done before and that he is a reader, too. It is amateurish.
A maddening error is seen when a character asks himself a question and it is answered for him by the author. Then there are the teases at chapter ends and the sudden yanks back to reality when he reminds us he is writing a book, when the hallmark of a good novel is that the reader enters into it completely and loses touch with the world of reality for the duration. It is my belief that it is never wise to attempt to mix humor with drama.
I tossed the book aside but then a few days later leafed through the parts I had not read, but it did not improve my opinion.
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mildly entertaining but basically flawed, October 21, 2006
Although he claims in the Author's Note to have first come up with the idea for Sign of the Cross back in 1998, it is clear that Chris Kuzneski's novel owes more than a little to The Da Vinci Code. Both books deal with millennia-old conspiracies that, if revealed, threaten the existence of Christianity by calling into question the nature of Jesus. There is also at least one direct reference to Dan Brown in Kuzneski's book.
From a publisher's standpoint, distributing a novel like this makes clear sense, as it exploits the popularity of the hottest fictional work in the last decade or more. And in ways, Sign of the Cross delivers, as it is an action-filled novel much in the same vein as Brown's book.
The story starts off with three separate plot lines that only slowly converge. In one, Nick Dial, an American homicide detective working for Interpol investigates the murder of a priest in Denmark; the victim has been crucified and there are a number of clues that point to a religious nature of the murder; soon, other, similar killings will occur.. In the second storyline, archaeologist Charles Boyd and his beautiful assistant Maria Pelati unearth a hidden catacomb in the Italian town of Orvieto; among the artifacts they find is a scroll about Jesus and how the Roman emperor Tiberius intended to deal with him. No sooner do they make their discovery than they are ambushed and almost killed by assassins; while they do escape, they are suddenly fugitives. In the third storyline, Jonathon Payne and his sidekick David Jones, two heroic characters from a previous Kuzneski book called The Plantation are forcibly recruited by the CIA to track down Boyd. Payne and Jones are your stereotypical ex-superspy sorts, formerly members of a secret government agency (called MANIAC of all things) who now do private adventuring.
This is not a great book; it is actually subpar. It is fast-moving and somewhat fun, and Kuzneski is a good plotter. Unfortunately, he is not a very good writer. At times, he seems to forget some of the fundamentals of writing: for example, when Nick Dial makes a phone call - and the narration is clearly from his point of view - we cannot be told that the person on the other end is rolling his eyes. Kuzneski also has an annoying habit of ending his chapters not with mini-cliffhangers but rather teasers, such as "Of course, that was nothing compared to the evidence that Frankie was about to uncover next." Once or twice, such teasers might be okay, but in multitude, they are just unpleasant. In general, his dialogue is flat and his characterization is rather superficial.
There is an epilogue that seems like Kuzneski's wishy-washy attempt to avoid angering Christians (at least Brown doesn't shy from controversy). Despite the many problems, however, I was actually entertained much of the time, so as I wavered between two and three stars, I will favor this book with the higher rating. Nonetheless, it is not a book I can really recommend; if you enjoy Dan Brown, you're better off looking elsewhere.
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