Gideon's Sword -- Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

I got an ARC of this book at Bouchercon.

Gideon Crew is a rocket scientist. Okay, maybe not, but he works at Los Alamos, and that's close enough for me. He's also a Ph. D. who was for a long time a professional thief, but then after he avenged the death of his father, he decided it was time to settle down. Before he can relax, he's recruited by a super-secret organization to do a little job for them. He decides to do it only after he discovers that he's going to die within a couple of years because of a rare medical condition.

If you think Crew sounds like a character in a lot of other bestsellers, well, you're probably right, and this book's probably headed for that list as soon as it hits the street. Even though it won't be published until February, Michael Bay has already bought it for the movies and commissioned a script.

I'm not sure what the title of the book means, but then I'm not a biblical scholar. I remember that Gideon's sword is metaphorical, or at least that's what I think I remember. As far as I can tell there's no sword, literal or metaphorical, in this novel. Crew is after a mcguffin. Nobody knows what it is, but then it doesn't really matter, does it? Nodding Crane, a Chinese assassin who plays a mean blues guitar and kills people with his special finger picks (again, a bestseller character if there ever was one), is out to prevent him. There are no prizes if you guess who wins.

I've read only one other book by Preston and Child. I thought it suffered from the "extended climax syndrome," which means that the climactic scene goes on and on. And on. That's true here, too. I admit that I skimmed a lot of pages toward the end. Compared to the other book by the pair that I read, though, this one's pretty short, a mere 342 pages of decent-sized print. It reads fast. If you like this kind of stuff, this is exactly the kind of stuff you'll like.