audiobook cover art
(this review contains massive spoilers)
Summary
The Book of Lies is the second Brad Meltzer audiobook that I listened to. The story begins when young Calvin Harper witness the accidental death of his mentally imbalanced mother indirectly caused by his father, Lloyd. Fast forward nineteen years later, and Calvin now goes by the name Cal an ex-DHS agent turned social worker, who together with Roosevelt, an ex-priest, patrol the streets looking for homeless people to save. Then one rainy night, they will find a man lying on the middle of the road, courtesy of a gunshot wound, who turns up to be Cal’s estranged father. They take him to the hospital, and as Cal wrestle with his feelings of abandonment towards his father, the latter is trying to get him to help have a shipment held up in customs, cleared. As this is all happening, an ex-policeman with a dog, of the same breed and the same name as that of Cain’s is tailing them.
Which Cain, you ask?
That Cain, you know, the one involved in the oldest recorded crime in the Bible. This connection is not a coincidence, since it will figure largely on the plot and the unfolding mystery in The Book of Lies. Apparently, after his brother’s murder, Cain was given by the Divine some heavenly and powerful secret knowledge, and together with the weapon he used to smite his brother, both the secret and the weapon survives to this time. The cop belongs to this group that wants it and they paid Cal’s father to get the map that will lead them to it, located inside the shipment that got held in customs. The map is in a comicbook, but of course, just like with the dog, it is not just any comic book. It is Action Comics # 1, or the very first published comicbook that featured Superman, the man of steel. Superman as most geeks know is the creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster when they were in his teens. The story goes that Jerry created a “superman” impervious to bullets, after he witnessed the death of his father, Mitchell Siegel, from a gunshot wound. Mitchell was shot because the killers are after a specific item that in his possession. The story further goes that Jerry came into possession of the that item and he placed clues on how to find it and the identity of his father’s killers in the unpublished first drafts of the Superman story. What this item is and how it relates to the story of Cain and how Cal, Lloyd and Lloyd’s friend, pursued by the ex-cop and a DHS agent, trace and figure out the clues left by Jerry Siegel to find this item, is what the book is all about.
Review
This is one of those books that starts with a fantastic premise, adds a sprinkling of implausible connections, and builds up into a crescendo, only to end with a whimper. I am reminded of the movie Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, wherein the Enterprise gets hijacked by a Vulcan religious zealot who was told by god to steal a starship and proceed to the center of the universe to visit him. You get excited with the premise, but kind of expect at the back of your mind that there is no way that they can pull off a face-to-face with God. So “god” turns out to be a malevolent alien imprisoned in a planet in the center of the universe who just wants to use the starship Enterprise as his get-away car.
Same here.
Meltzer teases us with a weapon or a secret given by God to Cain that survives to the modern era and ends up in the hands of Jerry Siegel’s dad. The father of the guy who co-created Superman. Imagine that! You forget how totally forced the story’s connections are and you set aside your incredulity. You ignore that little voice at the back of your head that keeps telling you that there is no way he would be able to pull this off without coming up with some totally lame ending. Your imagination starts to run wild. And like a zombie that only wants to get to the bottom of the mystery, the hook forces you to continue to listen to the audio book up to the end so you can find out what the secret, or weapon is.
Well Meltzer pulled a Star Trek V ending.
There is a weapon, but its nothing special, just your run-of-the-mill animal by-product that people during Cain’s time uses as their version of a weapon-tool-journal, some sort of Paleolithic Swiss army knife. The secret, well, do you really want me to tell you? I think you need to listen or read the book to find out, then you will know why I am not rushing to check out any of Meltzer’s works.