“The Lincoln Myth” talks about the Church of the Latter Day Saints and its involvement with the nation's history and who else but Cotton Malone to get involved and thwart the threat to the integrity of the United States.
Being a huge fan of Mr. Berry I expected a good deal of history being combined into a crisis. In this latest the plot has twists and turns carefully thought over. The action careens from Denmark to Austria to D.C. to Iowa and Utah and is interspersed with interludes from the Lincoln’s era. This is definitely more of a challenging intellectual thriller than the previous ones. One of the problems I had was to keep track of the speakers in order not to get lost and keep everything straight. After all I know little to nothing about Lincoln, the Mormons and the various conflicts such as the Civil War, the revolutionary War and Abraham Lincoln’s involvement. Of course here we have a wealth of real and fabricated history and it is especially difficult distinguishing where one ends and the other begins. We have thanks to this story a ringside view to the evolution of the Mormons and its growth into a worldwide religion.
At the heart of the novel is a plot coming from an extremist Mormon group to unhinge the United States. Malone risks life, liberty, and his greatest love in a race for the truth about Abraham Lincoln —- while the fate of the United States of America hangs in the balance. The pacing clipped along nicely with pleasant enough ebb and flow of action, story and historic aspects. Although it is hard to visualize that this powerful country was on the point of dissolving. This supposition was quite intriguing. Of course, the action finally builds to an overly neat resolution in the wilds of Utah and all is right.
Unlike the previous book, I was disappointed with this one. It rambles on and on and hashes the same story over and over again. I found the mystery very thin, contrived and anti-climactic. I slogged through many parts, contemplated abandoning it many times but still made it to the end…..not my preferred one and by far.
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