The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve BerryMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Month Read In: February 2022 Okay. I’m a feminist. I am. But my guilty pleasure is old white dude thrillers and hard boiled PI’s. Don’t hate me please.
My history with these goes all the way back to childhood watching westerns and Magnum PI/Simon & Simon/et al with my dad, listening to the old radio shows like “The Shadow” with my brother, and in my teen years it was THE James Bond (Sir Sean Connery of course) and Mike Hammer (The Stacy Keach).
When I first started reading ebooks on my first gen Nook and found Brad Thor’s Scot Harvath series and then stumbled across Berry’s “The Templar Legacy” introducing Cotton Malone and found that the characters have crossed over with each other in veiled references, along with characters from another old white dude’s series (James Rollins’ Sigma Force), I was guiltily ecstatic.
But this one. Ugh. This one was soooo hard to get through. It took me 159 days because there were plenty of days that I just didn’t want to hang out with Cotton on this adventure.
Now I’ve given this a lot of thought. Why do I like these things?? I’m a feminist and these types of books ROUTINELY make women out to be inferior, damsels in distress that need a big strong man to save them, or just plain old toys for the men to use, abuse, and discard. So why oh why do I keep READING THEM?!?!
It’s Indiana Jones’ fault.
History. I love history. I love the way many of these stories look back into mysterious gaps in history and fill it in with the bizarre, the conspiracies, the hypothetical, and the possibilities. Templar theories, Nazi experiments, Alexandrian mysteries, Church occultisms. Love. It.
But as much as the underlying tale of a mysterious First Civilization was, falsely buoyed by the name Charlemagne in the title, inherently interesting, the overall feeling and pacing of events left me bored.
Cotton has no interaction with other series regulars save Stephanie Nelle and even then only by phone. Two other series regulars, President Danny Daniels and Edwin Davis, are pretty integral to the plot and storyline but carry no interactions with Cotton. He also has no contact with his son, spends a couple pages at his Copenhagen bookstore home at the end, and also only references his on again off again girlfriend Casseopeia once or twice. (I want them to stay ‘off’, for the record. They are NOT good together.)
This book was solely about 3 conniving women, a mother and her two daughters, and Daddy Issues. Specifically for the two daughters and Cotton. I started the book just after my own father died and perhaps that has colored my perception, but really? 509 pages so Cotton, a nearly 50 year old man, can put away his daddy issues from childhood? And a set of twin women of about the same age can pit him between them and fight for Mommy’s approval after she’s pit them against one another their whole lives, and see who was right about Daddy and Grandpappy all those years ago?
509 pages? Really?
Character development and atmosphere was on the blah side of mediocre. The writing and plot were middling mediocre. Intrigue and my overall enjoyment was as bad as character development and atmosphere.
But frankly, the logic was the worst. Why the characters did any of the things they did is beyond me. This goes for the story’s villains and heroes alike. Sure, sure. Secret submarine. 11 men lost at sea, the twins’ and Cotton’s fathers among them. No rescue attempt. Classified mission. Classified mission to cover up said initial classified mission. Villain’s rise of power. Disgraced Nazi’s widowed daughter in law searching for misguided strength and legacy. Just blech.
The back and forth criss crossing of Stephanie and Edwin’s US travel that alternated with Cotton’s globetrotting at practical gun point was just… too much.
And the bad guys were a couple of women and a black guy. Whhhhhyyyyyy? Written by a white old man in 2008. Do better.
Still continuing with the series simply because on the whole, I like Cotton. He likes history and books and doesn’t give a damn that his son isn’t genetically his son and moved to Copenhagen because, well frankly, his own government sucks, but he still cares about his country and the people and friends in it.
And Stephanie’s turning into a bit of a badass, getting out from behind the desk and into the field and holding her own. I hear Casseopeia has her own series now? Can Stephanie get one? Maybe from the beginnings of the Magellan Billet? Just an idea, Mr. Berry. Just an idea.
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