Review & Contest: THE PARADISE PROPHECY by Robert Browne

I’m stepping a little out of genre today..but only a little in that The Paradise Prophecy is being marketed as mainstream thriller fiction. Really, though, it’s as supernatural as they come, with rampaging fallen angels getting ready for the Last Big Apocalypse—and the humans who uncover the truth and track down clues to find how to stave them off. Awesome read. 

Want to win a copy? Read on.

THE OFFICIAL BLURB:
A spectacular thriller inspired by John Milton's Paradise Lost in which the final chapter of the War in Heaven is about to play out on Earth, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.
            The Myth When God cast the archangel Satan into Hell, ending the War in Heaven, peace prevailed on Earth. Until the fallen angels took revenge in the Garden of Eden. Ever since, mankind has been in a struggle between good and evil, paradise and apocalypse: the fall of Rome, The Crusades, World Wars, nuclear proliferation, the Middle East Crisis... The War in Heaven never really ended-it just changed venues. For millennia, God's angels have been fighting Satan's demons on Earth, all in hopes of bringing about Satan's greatest ambition, the Apocalypse.
            The Reality Satan has never been closer to his goal than right now.

            Agent Bernadette Callahan is a talented investigator at a shadowy government organization known only as Section, on the trail of a serial killer with nearly supernatural abilities. Sebastian "Batty" LaLaurie is a religious historian who knows far too much about the other side- and that hard-earned knowledge is exactly what Callahan needs. This unlikely duo pair up for a race across the globe, decoding clues left in ancient texts from the Bible to Paradise Lost and beyond. In the process they stumble upon a vast conspiracy-one beyond the scope of mankind's darkest imagination.

MY THOUGHTS:

I’ve had this one sitting in my TBR pile for a while because I did something I shouldn’t have—I pre-judged it by a little book called The Da Vinci Code. I know I’m in the vast minority, but I wasn’t a fan of The Da Vinci Code, book or film. I thought it was a fascinating idea not so well executed by characters I didn’t much care about.

            Comparisons between Da Vinci and The Paradise Prophecy are inevitable—big, global missions by a couple of academic experts to uncover clues to a religious secret. Sounds familiar, right?

            But, for me, Paradise Prophecy is what that other book promised but didn’t quite deliver—a breakneck thriller with real supernatural religious undertones and the real fate of the world at stake. These dark angels aren’t romance fodder—they’re deadly and we really aren’t pulling for them, which makes the plight of Callahan and Batty, our unlikely dynamic duo, all the more sympathetic. This isn’t a light summer read, but it’s definitely a good one.

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