The Last Templar

I vaguely recalled that I have seen the trailer of a min-movie series on "The Last Templar". I am not certain if this book is the same as that of mini-movie series. If you enjoy reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons, this is a book of similar genre. In fact, this may be more layman and easier to visualise and follow even if you are not familiar with the religion.

The Last Templar was about a mysterious theft at the Metropolitan Museum of New York during the opening night by a group of 4 knights dressed as Templars. There was a gruesome beheading of a security guard. The most precious stolen goods were not the jewelled artefacts but a decoder which could point to the exact position of the sunken treasures of the Templars in the Medieval Ages. The witness of this whole theft was an archaeologist who worked with the chief investigator to recover the treasures and to find the instigator for the whole crime.

As the pair continued their mystery solving, they unconvered more sinister characters and a greater hidden secret. When they eventually found the treasure, they again went through the conflict of whether they should reveal the secret behind their finds or should they keep quiet about it. The faith of human kind belied what they have retrieved from the deep ocean. They have also discovered their feelings for each other in the process.

The Last Templar interpersed current days developments with the history which was absent in the writing of Dan Brown. In Dan Brown's books, what we knew of the historical developments were narrated through the voice of Prof John Langdon. It was also not a simple good against evil where the clan of the mystery solvers were often the pure good who were at odds with the evil. In The Last Templar, within the clique of the mystery solvers, there were also internal conflicts. What was similar between the two writings that the perceived authority of goodness and moral enforcer often might not be as innocent as we believed. While trying to sustain the faith, they might need to resort to underhand measures which were often at odds with the values that they preached.

There was no perfect saint or devil in the book. All of the characters carried with them their own baggages, their values and ideals which might appear selfish. With this more ambivalent characters, the book became a more realistic read than Dan Brown's. This is definitely one of the books that I highly recommend as a good thriller and for theology enthusiasts.