TodayBerry does historical fiction best
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Ever since the massive success of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” authors around the world have been trying to duplicate his genre and style.
Books about the Templars and their lost treasure sprang onto bookshelves all over. You couldn’t look at a bookstore display without seeing some version of a historical fiction treasure mystery.
Unfortunately, a lot of these books just don’t live up to the standards Brown created.
Except for one author — Steve Berry. In fact, Berry is better than Brown.
Back in December, Berry released his sixth novel of the “man seeks mythically historical treasure” genre. It’s called “The Venetian Betrayal.”
See, right there, Berry has a potential reader intrigued with that title.
In this novel, Cotton Malone, an agent for the U.S. Justice Department turned Danish bookseller, is drawn into a deadly search for Alexander the Great’s long-lost grave and the miraculous draught that supposedly cured Alexander many times.
Malone is aided by old friends Cassiopeia Vitt and Henrik Thorvaldson as they follow the clues left since 1000 A.D., racing to find the information before Irinia Zovastina, the evil leader of the Central Asian Federation.
Thrown into the plot is Zovastina’s quest to conquer the world using biological warfare and a greedy scientist/businessman’s discovery of the cure for HIV.
Nothing about this novel is slow. After a brief prologue introducing Alexander the Great, Berry throws us right into the flames of peril as Malone is trapped in a museum being consumed by an ancient substance called Greek fire.
From then on, this book is a constant page-turner, no doubt excelled by the one tactic all the authors of this genre have picked up. They use chapter breaks and short (very short) segments to create suspense. Without a doubt, every chapter leaves you with a cliffhanger that isn’t immediately resolved on the following page.
Also, Berry shifts between character perspectives using segments as short as a few paragraphs. This lets the reader know what each character is thinking during a critical scene, as well as creates a tension you have to get through before even thinking about putting the book down for the night.
For those who love this genre of novels, it is safe to say Berry never disappoints, whereas Brown lost his touch in novels like “Digital Fortress” and “Deception Point.”
Berry also sticks to his historical roots, often finding some way of tying it back to Russia (which, if you read my review last week, gets him major brownie points).
Previous novels include “The Romanov Prophecy,” discussing the legend that two of the royal children of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, escaped their brutal murder by Bolsheviks; “The Amber Room,” the search for the room created entirely of the prehistoric substance lost during World War II; and, of course, “The Templar Legacy,” which is another take on the Templars and their holy grail.
All of the books feature Cotton Malone as their hero, often with the aid of Thorvaldson, Vitt and several other charming characters.
Another asset of Berry’s handiwork is the fact that he doesn’t try to pass off fiction as historical fact. Each of his books contain an epilogue detailing what in the novel is based on history and what was purely a concoction of his imagination. So his books are fun to read and educational.
So now that I’ve found an author better than Brown, I’m hoping it’ll be made into a movie like “The Da Vinci Code.”
Let’s just hope Hollywood can find a better scriptwriter and give the leading man a better haircut. Denzel Washington would be perfect — he never looks bad.
