The Judas Testament (Hardcover)

The real intrigue here is how the sometimes masterful Easterman ( The Name of the Beast ) could set up such a diabolically imagined plot only to spoil the suspense in the concluding chapters. Unworldly Dr. Jack Gould, a half-Irish Catholic, half-Jewish scholar of Aramaic, becomes the unwitting pawn in a murderous struggle to possess a scroll written by Jesus--a startling document which threatens to rock the foundation of the Catholic church. Stefan Rosewicz, a ruthless antiquities collector, is the power behind Crux Orientalis, a fanatic right-wing league of the Church which wants the papyrus in order to exercise control over the Vatican. The other players are: Irina Kossenkova, an ex-Soviet agent; Parker, a key figure within a shadowy unit of the British SIS trying to cover up a bungled WW II spy operation; Father de Galais, leader of the "good guy" priests; and Maria, Rosewicz's daughter and the object of Jack's affection, who is being manipulated by the kidnappers of her three-year-old son Paul. Rife with betrayal, the plot plays out in a series of farfetched last-second rescues as hapless Jack, like a leaf in a windstorm, is taken captive by one malevolent gang after another until, instead of building suspense, it all becomes rather comic and tiresome.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An explosive Qumran papyrus spirited out of the Thousand Year Reich by its Soviet occupiers surfaces 50 years later as the brass ring in a grandly scaled game of intrigue--and the bane of unassuming Irish linguist Jack Gould's existence. What makes the papyrus--a letter from an Essene leader opposing rapprochement with Rome in the name of Judaic fundamentalism--deadly is its authorship by Jesus, revealed as an orthodox Mosaic zealot rather than as the Messiah. When Jack, responding to an urgent summons from his old friend Iosif Sharanskii in Moscow, agrees to help Iosif smuggle the document out of the country, he finds himself variously pursued by (1) KGB stalwarts, determined to keep their hold on this treasure; (2) the Crux Orientalis, a Catholic group who plan to impeach the document, attributing it to a Zionist conspiracy in order to strengthen their hopes of a new Holy Roman Empire throughout Europe; (3) a covey of right-wing prelates bent on destroying the document in order to preserve the True Church; and (4) an outlaw faction of Catholic priests who want to publish the document to the world. ``Rescued'' repeatedly by allies who turn out to be just as treacherous as the people they're rescuing him from (to the cost of much confusion for both Jack and the reader), Jack eventually finds himself in a Crux Orientalis cross-fire raging around Maria Rosewicz, the woman he loves: on one side, her husband Karl von Freudiger, a Ruhr industrialist who thinks 1945 was just a temporary setback; on the other, her father Stefan, a Stasi survivor planning to groom his grandson for world domination under a new world order. (But don't count the papists out either.) Easterman (Name of the Beast, 1992, etc.) provides an irresistible m‚lange: an attractive (if not overly bright) hero and heroine, international conspiracies, religious paranoia, a corps of double agents whose loyalties can turn on a dime, and an enormous supporting cast, most of whom end up getting executed by each other. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.