The Sanctuary
by Raymond Khoury
Orion, HK$112
At first glance, Raymond Khoury seems like yet another sheep in Dan Brown's clothing. His first novel, The Last Templar, certainly sounds like part of the herd, fusing a contemporary mystery with the now obligatory historical conspiracy and symbols to decode. A successful screenwriter (Khoury worked on BBC productions such as Spooks and Waking the Dead), he doles out his thrills and hidden history with precision. The Sanctuary suggests expertise in his new craft, even if originality is not an option. We begin in Baghdad. Special Forces discover a laboratory where human beings have been used as lab-rats for horrifying genetic experiments that may have produced a bio-weapon called the Hakeem. Cue a strange symbol - here, the Ouroboros, or snake eating its own tail - that links the modern world with 18th-century Europe and a book containing a secret that is so secret everyone on the continent is looking for it. Khoury's tale moves at warp speed. Henry James wrote longer sentences than some of Khoury's chapters. But the plot grips and, more importantly, convinces you about the worlds it creates. Read this book, but beware: you'll never look at an Ouroboros in the same way again.