Elisha’s Bones by Don Hoesel
on Nov4 2009
a job best left alone
Elisha’s Bones has just about everything one could ask for in an action adventure story: a flawed and somewhat misplaced hero, a love interest from the past sucked back into his chaotic profession, and a billionaire willing to spend his life’s fortune and the lives of whoever gets in the way of his slim hopes of life. Add to that a farfetched yet vaguely plausible biblical mystery and Don Hoesel’s debut suspense novel make an entertaining and intelligent read.
At the center of the story is Jack Hawthorne, a professor of archeology at a small North Carolina University with a back story that won’t wait. When an elusive billionaire dangles an unlimited budget for a short time archeological adventure to search for something that can’t possibly exist, Jack can’t resist. Within weeks his life is a tangled mess of international intrigue, murdered friends, and an ancient conspiracy that would have best been left buried. Written in first person present tense, the story has an immediacy that puts one inside this man’s shoes as he becomes first obsessed with a mystery and then running for his life with a woman he has been given an undeserved second chance with.
Hoesel gives us, in Elisha’s Bones, something Dan Brown attempts in the Da Vinci Code and the The Lost Symbol minus Brown’s seeming axe to grind against all things religious. While you may scratch your head at the end of the book and doubt if such a thing could really happen, you will also find yourself the next day wondering if perhaps it has. This is the kind of story that works on so many levels just about anyone who loves good fast-paced suspense can enjoy. If you want, consider its themes about faith, life, and death. Or, just fasten your seatbelt and join Jack and Espy as they race from Mayan pyramids in Venezuela, to Coptic churches in Ethiopia, to the vast outback for Australia. Either way, you won’t be disappointed when you discover what might have happened to Elisha’s bones.
Genre: Suspense
Publisher: Bethany House
Publication Date: March 2009
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
