e-Book The Last Prophecy (Ben and Danielle) download

The premise was good and could have made for a good story line. But come on, please.... am I really supposed to believe that Ben and Danielle can conduct all of these super human exploits with hardly a scratch? They seem to pop up everywhere, just in time to save the day, while everyone else gets picked off like fleas! Their wounds seem to heal supernaturally!

And then I'm supposed to believe that a pot head who's stupid enough to believe that he's going to get all A's for the semester because he's helping the government, can crack the computer code that none of the big boys can? Nah...

I like my protagonists a little more human, capable of mistakes, and more believeable and thereby likeable.

I don't think I'll be reading any more of Land's books for a while. This one supposedly took place over a 12 day period and that was about 11 days too long for me.

With the hype over the Da Vinci Code and its related popularity, you can sometimes get the feeling that some people probably think the grand conspiracy novel started with Dan Brown. Of course, this is not the case, as Brown is merely one in a long line of such thriller writers. Probably the biggest in the bunch was Robert Ludlum, but not to be forgotten is Jon Land. Not quite the big name that Ludlum or Brown, Land is nonetheless the most pure fun, with outlandish plots and tons of action.

The Last Prophecy brings back Danielle Barnea, an ex-Israeli cop and Ben Kamal, a former Palestinian detective. Despite the obvious conflicts caused by their different backgrounds, the two are faithful lovers and, as the novel begins, both working as investigators for the U.N. In this case, the two are called to look into a mass murder in a Palestinian village. At first, it appears to be a massacre by Israeli troops, but it soon enough appears to be something far more sinister, a conspiracy tied to events uncovered at the World War II and some lost prophecies of Nostradamus. The last of these prophecies provides the key to the conspiracy.

Land uses his standard formula for his Barnea/Kamal novels: the two split up for the majority of the book to separately unearth parts of the plot only to converge at the end to stop the bad guys. Typically, the people who provide the information are assassinated by the villains before they can reveal all. This formula works well enough since Land executes it well (and really, Brown and Ludlum use a similar formula themselves).

I won't say this is perfect writing, but it's plenty good enough to merit a strong four stars. My biggest "problem" with Land is that he is only writing books featuring Barnea and Kamal; I miss his older novels with Blaine McCracken, which were even more delightfully outlandish with their James Bond-like world conquest plots. But in the absence of McCracken, this series still fits the bill for what Land does best: entertain from beginning to end.

WELL BEN AND DANIELLE ARE AT IT AGAIN.... FROM BLOODY WIPE OUT TO CATCHING THE BAD GUY'S...

Ben and Danielle are two of my favorite characters developed by Jon Land. As representatives of two sworn enemies in the middle east, these two people find a way to work together and find love, Jon Land educates the reader about the complexity of middle east politics and how difficult it is to build trust between all the players in the region.

Reading this story was like plowing through mud. It was very boring in a lot of sections. Sometimes I got lost as to who was who as far as characters were concerned. This book was not what I expected, so I was disappointed.

I’ve seen this book many times past. Not exactly this one book but other books, films, and tales with the same basic plot: intrepid adventurers discover an ancient and secret writing or glyph well hidden in some exotic/dangerous/gruesome local. Only some obscure university professor/retired cryptographer/computer geek can decode this mysterious writing.

Meantime, eeevil (keep “eeevil") forces conduct a virulent campaign of violence and skulduggery to prevent the decoding and to keep the adventurers at bay: usually a handsome fellow and comely lass who initially are at loggerheads, then sure enough they find love, etc. Overcoming all hazards the pair get the text decoded and sure enough it details incantations to call Beelzebub to rise from Hades to purloin our souls, or reveals the scheme of some ancient religious order/military cabal/or space aliens plans to rule/destroy the world.

Back to the book. The Last Prophecy is seriously overwritten in codswallop: 414 pages of small print in the paperback edition. The flood of words becloud the thrust of an obscure and typically thin plot. The narrative lacks coherence making it difficult to comprehend—it wanders from local to local introducing different characters with agendas that seem to be disconnected. We are inundated with ornamental minutiae that muddle the narrative making this tome even more difficult to follow—it’s just so much unnecessary word filler. Another negative I have with this book is that the author suffused the narrative with screeds about how awful/brutal/inhuman the Israelis treat the downtrodden, deserving, and debauched Palestinians. Lastly, at last, the plot is contrived to a crippling fault in several scenes as the Deus ex machina saves our daring-do characters from a fate worse than death, or even worse.

Actually, stripped with extremely sharp editing, this book would make a straight forward, interesting adventure novella of 50K words or thereabouts.