Sabbatical reading

Couldn't spend all of my time working on the paper or worshipping so I took advantage of the small but diverse library at Holy Cross.  Between Tuesday and Saturday I bumped off the following books:

The Lighthouse by P.D.James - This is one of her Dalgliesh series of which I may have read one before (maybe an audio book?).  Set on a fictional island of the coast of southern England it's something of a locked room mystery with a bit of SARS thrown in for good measure.  James has a sterling rep and lived up to it as far as I'm concerned.  Even though I had to kind of "fill in the blanks" on some of the ongoing relationships (nothing like starting in the middle of a series.  I believe this is #13 in the Dalgliesh series) it was well written and sucked you right in.  Really enjoyed it.

The second book was also an interesting story but wasn't nearly as well written.  Does that make sense?  The book was "The Templar Legacy" (the title alone should tell you all you need to know) by Steve Berry.  Berry has written two other books that apparently sold pretty well and this one made the NY Times Best Seller list.  It's a very "DaVinci Code" kind of story about the secrets of the ancient monastic warriors known as the Knights Templar.  Their actual story is interesting but not nearly as convoluted as the author would have you believe.  His real short coming is some truly awful, trite pieces of writing scattered through the story.  I'm not sure who should be more ashamed the author or his editor.  In the end the story is interesting enough if fairly standard.  He makes some "statements" about Christianity that I thought were idiotic and shallow but hey it's fiction.  If you need to fill empty hours, want a reasonably well told story and are willing to laugh at the author's shortcomings (if he just worked a little harder at his writing he'd be pretty good.  He knows how to tell a story) you'll like it.  Apparently the main character is now the hero of a series of books.  I might just give another one a chance.