The Last Templar – Raymond Khoury
I bought this book at the airport, just before leaving Britain to live in Kazakhstan.
As with most books I buy at an airport, I was really looking for something relatively light to read, that could be read in small batches, whilst waiting for connecting flights etc.
As it turned out, I didn’t get around to reading until we’d started to move into our own flat over here in Astana. The basic outline of the story is split between two times – present day and the 13th Century (AD). For anyone not familiar with the stories and legends surrounding the Knights Templar, it wouldn’t do any harm to do a 5 minute research session before starting the novel. Luckily I’d seen a short documentary on TV a few months previously (hence my interest in the book), and was really looking forward to reading it.
The action really starts when a daring robbery is committed in present-day Manhattan, and a detective is assigned to investigating the background to it. Soon, the reader is given a small glimpse into the last breaths of the Knights Templar group, and their efforts to hide a priceless/vital piece of evidence from the people who are trying to obliterate the Knights.
Just what this item is, and why so many people were, and still are, interested in it, is explained in the book, and the climatic ending, although predictable in some ways, was still worth the reading.