"The Righteous Men" is a Solid Mystery If A Bit of a "DaVinci Code" Knock Off

 

“The Righteous Men” isn’t bad but a bit silly in parts but also a solid page turner. It’s obvious this first novel by Sam Bourne, a pen name for an award-winning journalist from the UK, Jonathan Freedland, is trying to ride the coattails of the then mega bestseller “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. It even says on the cover of the novel that this is the biggest challenger to Dan Brown’s crown.

The plot concerns a young journalist named Will Monroe, an American who was raised overseas in the UK. He never knew this father very well until he was an adult living in New York City. He’s also married. His wife gets mad at him one day because he forgot the appointment of visiting a fidelity doctor, and that’s the last time he sees her before she is kidnapped. I was a little hazy on the details of how she got kidnapped, and the book doesn’t dive too much into that. However, we quickly find her kidnaping is part of a bigger conspiracy where good men around the world are being killed. Soon Will is thrown into a vast conspiracy which includes a cult which shares beliefs with more mainstream Jewish branches. He also teams up with an old flame, who is constantly described as hot. The author describes her being attractive way too many times throughout the book. However, she has a secret of her own.

The book kept me turning pages and is a solid enough mystery. However, at 568 pages, the book felt a bit too long. “The DaVinci Code”, by contrast, was 489 pages, which felt like enough. It’s going to be hard not to bring up “The DaVinci Code” in this review, because this book obviously wants to be it. One of the things other reviewers pointed out about this book is it’s better written than “The DaVinci Code”, which isn’t that hard but also missing the point. People don’t read Dan Brown for great proses. They read Dan Brown for a conspiracy thriller crossed with travel porn. I’ve read just about every Dan Brown novel myself, and I would be lying if I didn’t say they are fun reads.

However, New York City doesn’t make for great travel porn like Robert Langon running through Paris, and a Jewish cult having a conspiracy isn’t as interesting as an established mega religion like the Catholic Church having one. There are a ton of twists and turns in this book, and Will keeps getting text messages with religious riddles. I was mostly interested in why good people around the world where being murdered. These men being murdered where all doing good deeds, but a good chunk of this book was scenes of Will and his ex-girlfriend running through New York City.

The twist at the end of the book didn’t surprise me, but I’ve read so many of these types of these. All in all, it was a solid page turner.