Overall, it wasn't a bad book. It was described as "sort of like The Da Vinci Code but done better," which wasn't much of an endorsement to me. :) It was a gift, though, and thus came recommended, so I gave it a shot. The characters and writing were pretty well done, I think, but the premise was why I had to give this two stars.

Basically, the bad guy is on a crusade (tee hee :) against the church (for reasons you can read in the book). He finds out about this mysterious document, held by the Knights Templar for years until lost, so sets out on a murderous quest to recover it. This text, he believes, will finally show the Church to the sham he feels it is! cue sinister music And that's fine as far as it goes. I don't mind admitting that I'm a Christian, and I'm used to people rejecting the Faith I know to be true. I'm also used to various attacks on said faith and the church, and I've read some decent ones, but this one is based on such poorly thought out reasons that it really dragged the book down. Vance's multi-page sermon on what REALLY happened in the first and second century reads like a middle school-level atheist proclamation. There are better places to go than here for a complete rebuttal of the claims the author is ostensibly making through the book, so I won't go into it all here, but I think the book would have been much better without this section.

In the end, though, it was a fairly entertaining read, I guess, if you can ignore the atheist dogma, which wasn't really that hard as it wasn't really that well put. :)