The Last Prophecy FROM THE PUBLISHER
"1945: while liberating a concentration camp, an American medical unit uncovers something beneath a body-laden trench. Sixty years later, the survivors of that unit are systematically murdered because of what they saw." "The Present: Enter former Palestinian-American detective Ben Kamal and his Israeli counterpart, Danielle Barnea. Working for the United Nations, Ben and Danielle are forced to return to the Middle East to investigate a massacre in a Palestinian village. They quickly learn that the roots of that massacre lie elsewhere, in another era, on another continent." "While Ben follows the trail of the shadowy force responsible, Danielle finds herself swept into a maelstrom where the past and the present collide, joined by an ancient text of prophecies that predicts a cataclysmic event about to strike the United States. The only way to change a fate foretold long before is to decipher a cryptic message shrouded in secrecy and guarded by a hidden army." As time ticks down, Ben and Danielle face off against a new and all-powerful enemy with its own crazed reasons for wanting America's way of life destroyed. Their only hope: to use the Last Prophecy.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Land's series seems to gain momentum with every installment, and his latest is as timely and extravagantly plotted as ever. In their seventh adventure, dynamic law enforcement duo and lovers Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea are dispatched by their new employer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, to investigate a massacre in the Palestinian village of Bureij. Ben, a rugged Palestinian-American detective, and Danielle, a beautiful former Israeli police inspector, soon discover that the massacre has little to do with current tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, the attack is rooted in a discovery made by Allied soldiers in 1945. The mysterious cache of steel canisters uncovered under stacks of corpses at Buchenwald pulses beneath the present-day action like a ticking time bomb. Everyone who has come into contact with the canisters in the half-century since their discovery has wound up dead, and a Nostradamus prophecy of universal destruction adds another layer of menace to the tale. Ben and Danielle's investigation leads them into conflict with renegades all over the globe, including the last vestiges of the Iraqi Special Republican Guard and a network of rogue ex-Soviet moles. Land's prose can be a little overheated, but the breakneck pace and chockablock plotting leave protagonists (and the civilized world) constantly teetering on the brink of destruction. Highly entertaining from start to finish, this is prime escapist fiction, implausible yet riveting. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Seventh in Land's swiftly paced prisoners-of-a-world-in-conflict saga. Center stage again are Palestinian-American Police Inspector Ben Kamal and his beloved, ex-Israeli Chief Inspector Danielle Barnea, who is now a fugitive from Israel and works with Ben for the United Nations Safety and Security Service. In The Blue Widows (2003), the couple faced down terrorists who hoped to fulfill a prophecy about the Black Death by means of a plot enjoined by terrorists and drug companies to kill half of the US population. Switch now to the prophecies of Nostradamus and the present-day massacre of a Palestinian village. First, though, back in 1945, a team of American soldiers liberating Buchenwald find under a pit of corpses four large sealed steel containers-a McGuffin not so distant from the one in The Maltese Falcon. As with the Falcon, we don't find out what's in the containers until near novel's end, but everyone tied to these containers winds up dead. Ben and Danielle are working against plots in different parts of the world that happen later to join in with the Nostradamus plot-itself an End of All Things prophecy bent on the destruction of all US states. While Ben chases down an Iraqi villain in the new Baghdad, the UN sends Danielle back to Israel on a UN visa, where she's still wanted but is allowed in because the Israelis hate the hypocritical UN as strongly as they do the Palestinians (and as Danielle did when she worked for Israeli Security). Her presence now will allow Israel the power to deny everything in the event it doesn't hear what it wants about the Palestinian massacre she's investigating. While Ben and Danielle draw ever closer together, both meet surprise bursts of flyingbullets in every fourth or fifth chapter. Engaging heartstuff about lovers divided by religious loyalties, while Land's mock-serious pulp fiction plot moves hell-bent-just as fans want and as Land loves to deliver.
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