GOSPEL TRUTHS
by J.G. Sandom
Eight hundred years ago, somebody hid a copy of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas—the oft-fabled Q document directly reporting Christ's words—in some cubbyhole in Chartres Cathedral. Now, in 1983, Inspector Nigel Lyman, visiting Amiens Cathedral for leads in the mysterious year-old death of an Italian banker in London, finds himself not only pulled into an unlikely treasure hunt in Amiens and Chartres but surrounded by other hunters: hopelessly naive American architect/geometrician Joseph Koster; tour guide Guy Soury-Fontaine and his sister Mariane; their Vatican bank-chief cousin Archbishop Kazimierz Grabowski; mobster Marco Scarcella, hoping to use the document to blackmail the Vatican into resuming his money-laundering; and the unknown agents of crazy right-wing Countess Irene de Rochambaud, determined to publish the Good News to all the world. First-novelist Sandom pulls out all the stops, but the whole affair seems weightless—probably because all that good guys/bad guys plotting shoves those Gospel truths so far into the background.