It's interesting to me to see the various different threads Rollins attempts to weave together here. Not only are there the various religious ones, as clues are left at various religious sites (such as the purported burial site of Mary's father, of Job, and the like), and the notion of "virgin birth" is addressed somewhat head-on, but also the way various characters seem culled from other stories. Lady Kara Kensington is reminiscent of Tomb Raider's Lara Croft: not so much for her figure or her combat ability, but just in her attitude, her interest in antiquities, and the loss of her father. Omaha Dunn - well, even Rollins has to acknowledge this character's inspiration, even going so far as to have several people call him "Indiana" from time to time. Painter Crowe is something of a James Bond clone, albeit without Bond's signature charm or casual indifference to the deaths of others. And the villains are sort of the stock "secret society" that as infiltrated the U.S. government for some sinister purpose of their own.

Ultimately, while Rollins is a very capable author and much of his narrative is dynamic and well-written, pushing the reader along toward an ever more perilous climax, where the story falters is in the characters and in the plot. The characters seem somewhat like cardboard cutouts, each constructed to serve a certain purpose in the story but never seeming like real people. When Rollins does try to "explain" a character, as he does with a few scenes with Cassandra where we end up "in her head," it comes across as forced rather than natural. It's as if somebody told him, "I don't really understand this character's motivation," so he dropped in a couple of scenes that would allow us to "relate" to her. These scenes, and the revelations regarding the abuse Cassandra faced as a child, just didn't seem to be part of a cohesive whole.

Likewise, rather than show us the buildup of romantic relationships, he resorts to simply having the characters tell us their feelings through their thoughts. It's not that we shouldn't be privy to the characters' thoughts, or that those thoughts might not be contrary to what they say. Instead, it's that he doesn't actually spend much time constructing relationships between dialogue or the like. One of my complaints about many action films is the idea that the male and female leads have to fall "in love" by the end of the picture, even though they may have just met one another. Many screenwriters seem to think all they have to do is have the characters run around together and then fall in bed with one another: oh look, how romantic. The best, or most convincing, of such sequences are in films where they actually take the time to build the relationships (a successful example that comes to mind is Speed, where they spent a lot of time building the relationship between Sandra Bullock's character and Keanu Reeves' character; at the end, when she tells him that relationships based on sudden emotional stress rarely last, you actually care about the relationship itself). I felt as though Rollins failed to take the time to build such emotional attachments between his characters: he tells the reader such feelings exist, but never really demonstrates them through their interaction with one another.