skbreese's Full Review: Allan Folsom - The Machiavelli Covenant
The New York Times bestselling Author Allan Folsom, first introduced his readers to former LAPD detective Nicholas Marten, in his previous novel The Exile. Marten reappears in Folsom's follow-up effort, The Machiavelli Covenant, in a fast paced suspense thriller that takes him from Washington, to Paris, Berlin, Malta, and Barcelona as he tries to prevent a sinister and powerful brotherhood of conspirators from their pursuit of world domination, guided by the blueprint from a document by Renaissance political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli.
When Marten's former girlfriend, Caroline Parsons, dies from a mysterious infection, after the sudden death of her son and husband, Marden begins an investigation that leads him to the discovery that her husband, a current U. S. Congressman, had uncovered an illegal bioweapons program. Further investigation leads him to the discovery of a secret plot within the White House to demand that the President John Henry Harris, authorize the assassination of the Chancellor Germany and President of France at the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw.
Marten joins forces with the President and an attractive French photojournalist, Demi Picard, as they pursue a powerful clandestine organization, whose goal is to replace the the leaders of France and Germany in order to further their own ambitions of world dominance through biological warfare in the middle east. Severely outnumbered, they must engineer a number of miraculous escapes in order to achieve their goal of circumventing disaster.
Another in the long list of recent suspense thrillers, beginning with The Da Vinci Code, with themes built around famous figures from the Renaissance, this book takes the reader on a wildly fascinating journey as the characters unravel a plot full of unexpected twists and turns. Unfortunately, the plot is much too far-fetched, and the characters too underdeveloped to be very convincing. Folsom fashions a sort of low key romantic appeal between Marten and Demi Picard that never really coalesces. Although there is plenty of heart pounding, fast paced, action, the book is about 200 pages too long, and gets bogged down, at times, in all the activity and conspiracy theories that are just not very plausible, such as the involvement of half of the members of the President's cabinet in an international conspiracy to assassinate world leaders of allied countries, based on a centuries old document containing the blueprint for gaining political power.
Folsom's writing style is another bothersome issue, in that the book is broken down into brief chapters, some no longer than 2 sentences, meant to propel the fast paced plot along at a rapid speed. However, some of the sentences are so awkwardly written, I had to read them several times in order to grasp the meaning, such as the following opening lines to one of the paragraphs:
"Matches. The matches the president still carried from the diversionary fire he'd started in the Barcelona train station to escape the Spanish police. By Marten's count there were eleven left. Seven had already been used to get them this far into the pitch black of the tunnel, wherever "this far" was and whatever tunnel this was..."
The book is literally filled with one word sentences, and poorly structure paragraphs.
I could not wait to finish reading this sprawling 690 page novel. Although parts of it were exciting, overall, it was an obvious attempt to capitalize on the Da Vinci code craze, and appears to be hastily written, without any real effort to fully tie together the various subplots. As a long time fan of Folsom (The Day After Tomorrow), I was disappointed in this effort. The abrupt ending to the epilogue leads the reader to believe that a sequel is forthcoming. If the various shortcomings in The Machiavelli Covenant are any indication of what to expect from the sequel, I think I'll pass.
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