La cúpula de oro que corona a Gran Pirámide de Gizah protege a la Tierra de las inundaciones provocadas por la radiación de una gran mancha solar conocida como Tartarus, que se sitúa sobre la Tierra cada 4500 años. Para evitar que nadie se apodere de la cúpula y tenga en sus manos esta gran poder, Alejandro Magno rompe la pieza en siete partes y las oculta en las Siete Maravillas del mundo antiguo. Ahora, en el año 2006, Tartarus está a punto de reaparecer. Aquel que pueda colocar de nuevo la cúpula en la Pirámide el día en el que Tartarus amenace la Tierra obtendrá un poder ilimitado durante mil año. Varias naciones rivales se lanzan a una carrera desesperada para encontrar las legendiarias siete maravillas: los Estados Unidos, Europa y un misterioso grupo conocido como Los Nueve.

In ancient times, a Golden Capstone was placed atop the Great Pyramid at Giza during a rare solar event called the Tartarus rotation. Once every 4,500 years, a superhot sunspot - the Tartaus sunspot - aligned itself with Earth and caused immense worldwide flooding and sun-scorching. It is said that when the Capstone sat atop the Great Pyramid, no such flooding or solar damage occurred. And, according to legend, whosoever places the Capstone on the pyramid at the next Tartarus Rotation will gain absolute power over Earth for the next 1,000 years. ( )

I read it for book club and while it wasn't great, it was okay. I don't know whether I just don't like archeological adventures or just didn't like this guy's style. I sort of felt the whole thing just wasn't real plausible. Then there was the writing style. You never really knew anyone well enough to care. All the characters were rather cardboard. Then the action sequences were not very believable at all. They seemed to foil trap after trap with no real advance planning except for the first time but seemed to always have just what they needed and always made the right choices on the fly each time they came to a new trap.

Maybe I'll try a different author in this genre before I give up on archeological thrillers. ( )

Well, it was better than Scarecrow.

I thought the idea was great but lacked something in the execution, especially in the action scenes. Would have made a great movie though.

2.5* ( )

A few weeks ago someone in my apartment building left a bunch of old magazines and recipe books in the lobby on a shelf that acts as a kind of internal charity shop. Amongst the 2008 editions of Marie Claire magazines was this book. Judging the book by its cover I assumed it would be god-awful pop fiction riding the Dan Brown bandwagon, so I of course picked it up and read it today on a return trip to Oxford.

I confess, the book isn't terrible. I'm used to suspending my sense of disbelief when reading, but I wasn't aware when I started it that Matthew Reilly books require the reader to completely disregard the physical rules of our universe, maybe if I'd been forewarned I'd have enjoyed the book more. But like I said: it wasn't terrible.

There are some issues with the book and I'll get them out of the way quickly. First, Matthew Reilly loves italics. I got the distinct impression he read his first draft and decided there just weren't enough slanty letters, so dropped italic dust all over each page, oftentimes on words that don't even need emphasis.

He also has a thing for exclamation marks. I'm honestly not used to seeing these outside of speech. If something dramatic happens in a book I assume I'll notice, I don't really need an exclamation mark to tell me.

Another punctuation mark of choice is the ellipsis. Far too many times something dramatic started happeneing…
… and then was resolved on the next line. If this were a tv series and those dots represented seven days between broadcasts then they would invoke a lot of tension, but when they involve dropping my eyes to the next line, something they have to do every dozen words anyway, all it does is irk.

The three issues above are infused in a sentence of comedic genius about half way into the book. I present my favourite sentence in Seven Ancient Wonders:

They were being attacked…
…from the golf course!

A perhaps misplaced issue I had with the book is the presence of schematic diagrams of the various places visited in the text. They kind of give the impression that the author doesn't quite trust in his ability to describe the current location, or the reader's ability to imagine it.

Finally, and most anally, there's a lot of Egyptian writing mentioned in the book. At their first appearance Reilly called the symbols hieroglyphs, and I rejoiced. Then the next time he said hieroglyphics, and I died a little. He couldn't seem to figure out which one he should use so did what I used to do on French exams and used them both alternately, figuring he'd get at least half of them right. On a similarly pedantic note, at one point he describes a cross shaped room as being "cross shaped", then later describes an identically shaped room as being "†-shaped". Why?

Despite all that the book zips along at such a pace that by the time any of these things annoyed me it was already a few pages passed. It's sillier than Da Vinci Code but, as the author says in an interview at the end of the book, the book is more Indiana Jones than Robert Langdon. Which I'd guessed the nineteenth time the heroes triggered a trap that sent a massive boulder chasing them down a slope…
… and then they dived out of the way just in time! ( )