The Ring: The Last Knight Templar’s Inheritance
For her twenty-seventh birthday, New York lawyer Cristina Wilson receives a surprise gift from her late godfather, a ruby ring that sparks disturbing dreams. Eager to learn its history she returns to Barcelona, where she grew up, to attend the reading of her godfather’s second will. That document sets her and her childhood friends, Orion and Luis, on a search for the Templar treasure. Others are as eager to find it as they are, and soon the trio find themselves immersed in a life and death struggle for a cache that has lain hidden for hundreds of years. Also twined through the main plot is the mystery behind Cristina’s godfather’s suicide along with her mother’s reluctance for her to return to her childhood home.
This novel is a difficult one to review. While the story premise is interesting, the rather stiff translation combined with a somewhat unsympathetic protagonist and meandering plotline make it a rather uneven read. Several large historical info dumps also serve to slow the pace. Though it’s narrated in first person, I found myself distanced from Cristina. It’s hard to tell if this was because of the translation masking her voice or because she was unappealing, abandoning her fiancé for her first love even as she flirted with their enemy.
On the more positive side, the setting is convincing, with Barcelona and its environs easy to see in the mind’s eye as the characters conduct their search. The city’s winding streets and energy drew me in and kept me reading when other story elements tempted me to put the book down.
Fans of The Da Vinci Code and other similar stories may want to read this book for comparison’s sake.
