While all of the ingredients were there for this book to an exciting and captivating story, it fell well short. I had a hard time maintaining interest, at times forcing myself to continue in the hopes that something with such an interesting premise would gel and become compelling. Unfortunately, it never gelled for me.

Napoleon’s Pyramids is a historical adventure/mystery that roams from post-revolutionary France to Egypt. Sprinkle in references to Ben Franklin and Napoleon and it sounds great. Unfortunately, the book suffered from a kitchen-sink plot, meaning that the author threw in everything related to ancient mysteries - the Golden Mean, pi, astrology and horoscopes, freemasonry, Egyptian Rite, the Fibonacci sequence, Eqyptian mythology, gypsies, the Holy Grail. Even Moses and the Ark of the Covenant were tossed in for good measure.

The main character, Ethan Gage, is a playboy with wanderlust and a thirst for easy living. After winning a mysterious medallion in a poker game, he is hunted, literally to the corners of the world, by unknown assailants who want it back. Based on his association with Franklin, Gage signs on as a savant with Napoleon’s voyage to Egypt in order to escape. Somehow, the bad guys manage to track him down in Egypt. Coincidences pile up, requiring Gage and his associates to comment frequently about things being fated by the gods in order to explain the outlandish coincidences.

Many of the descriptions were soft and didn’t provide a real sense of certain characters, settings, or events. Characters are introduced en masse and all of the savants blended together. The drawn-out efforts to solve the mystery of the medallion became tiresome. I found myself skimming a lot.

And the ending! To have suffered through the entire book and then have such a self-serving ending frankly made me a little cranky. The author may as well have plastered a pre-order form for the sequel that he obviously already had planned. I don’t think I’ll be adding that to my “to-read” list.