It’s time now to talk about thrillers. As a first-effort in novel writing, the brotherhood of the holy shroud shows Julia Navarro’s agility in making up conflicts and events. Her good command on the structure of this novel shows how, contrary to being first-novel writer, Julia Navarro is not a newbie in literary (or, more precisely, genre literary) reading.
Its structure (by this, i mean making a certain paragraph tell about ancient events and then telling present events in a subsequent chapter, which will be followed by another ancient event—the continuation of the ancient event told two chapters before—and then presenting the conclusion of the book in the last chapter where the answer of the present’s conflict is in the last event in the chain of ancient events) shows how she knows exactly how to make readers’ fingers so badly stuck on the book pages that they wouldn’t leave the book (or even hold it tighter when they go to the john. Hahaha…
Well, for me, a moslem who didn’t know nothing (previously) about the (magical?) history of the holy shroud, this book doesn’t even a bit make me lost in the history of the shroud. I could just enjoy it as an adventure story. As a thriller, it just is, it is!
