I've Got a Secret?

The Genesis Secret is the first novel of Tom Knox who is a British journalist. In its subject matter, it has drawn comparisons to The DaVinci Code and other similar thrillers involving religious and Biblical themes. I think Knox's work is more literary than Brown's, but Brown does a superb job of pacing his novel and literary quality aside The Genesis Code is not a page turner like Brown's works. Nevertheless, Knox's work is still a good read and provides a glimpse of a world that I was totally unfamiliar with.
The centerpiece of The Genesis Secret is a site in Turkish Kurdistan known as Gobekli Tepe, which is an archaeological site nearly 12,000 years old. This means that it might be the oldest site of human civilization known to humanity. Within that region there is a group of people known of the Cult of the Angels or Angelicans. Within their own culture they are called the Yezidi.
The protagonist is a British-American writer named Rob Luttrell who stumbles upon a more complex story than an ancient archaeological dig when he is assigned to cover this site. Along the way he meets a French osteoarchaeologist and biological anthropology looking through the human remains in these sites.
Soon Luttrell and Brown are on a search for something known as "The Black Book" that originally belonged to the Yezidi and whose location might be still in Kurdistan or might be in Europe. A nice twist is the incorporation of selections of Irish mythology and history found in James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
More sinister is the existence of a group of young rich men who try to relieve their ennui with macabre and grotesque ritual killings of individuals who happen to get into their way as they conduct their own search for "The Black Book." Readers learn about the origins of a European-Asian encounter with the Hellfire Club, whose members included Benjamin Franklin.
Without giving away the ending, I felt the "secret" in the title was anti-climactic. Nor is the secret revealed necessarily as earth-shattering as the book leads to believe it is.
This rather mundane "revelation" might not be the fault of Tom Knox, but might be more a characteristic of a genre of literature that might be reaching the point where the strange nexus of religion, politics, science, and faith might have exhausted the store of secrets that drive these novels.
However, I did enjoy this book and found myself staying up late into the morning to finish it.

Czar