The Sign could have been a really good book, but I started it and stopped, and started again and stopped, because the premise for this book is out of whack with my core beliefs and my mind just would NOT wrap around what Khoury was trying to promote to me, the reader.

We have a news reporter who is trying to be the best she can be in a world that is foreign to her and her sensibilities, a car thief turned into car connoisseur / rebuilder who later turns into a would-be FBI or CIA anti-terrorist agent who knows all of the most sophisticated survival techniques, and a bunch of scientists who want to  rule the world through making people believe in something that they are promoting by way of "mind control," Pavlov-style.

I loved and raved about The Last Templar (also reviewed on Myshelf). It was a really good book, and I read it really fast because I enjoyed it.  If an author wants to gain a readership, he needs to keep his personal views to himself until he has a good following, and then he can take the reader slowly into his thoughts.   In The Sign, Khoury gives us a thin plot that takes you to a very remote place in Egypt where a monk is hiding in a cave, painting signs on the ceiling. After being on a trek through the desert for a very long time, the monk is feverish with delirium. Or is it mind control that is causing him to paint the signs?

Next we have a mysterious Apparition showing up over the Antarctic ice cap, just as it is breaking apart and being filmed by the news crew from a major TV outlet. The Apparition attempts to promote the theory that we have to embrace climate change and warning of all the destruction that will happen to the world because if it.

Then, one of the scientists working in Africa to develop the supposed apparition finds out that he is being used. What is being done with his work, and the work of the others who are there with him, is not what they intended.  He ends up dead and it is his brother— the car thief turned car connoisseur— who is trying to find him, or at least learn whether or not he is really dead.

Then the Apparition starts showing up elsewhere and the press is all over it and poor Father Jerome becomes a sort of Prophet or modern day Jesus. But is it all made up science, not the real second coming as everyone is being led to believe?  Or, if not made up science, then what is it?  The Church and Religion in all of its many forms pose many questions that need to be answered through the honest introspection of the individual. That takes time and thought.  Father Jerome either turns into some sort of new religion prophet or is he brainwashed and a prisoner of his own honesty.

My recommendation to Khoury, go back to what made you a very good writer in The Last Templar, and write about things that you can put passion into without trying to make all of your readers into something we do not want to be.  You lost me on this book, even though I know that you have good stories inside of your mind. All you need to do is go back and find them again, and I will read more from you.  It is well written, with the glaring exception of a feasible, realistic storyline.

To be completely honest, I asked for this book because I read The Last Templar with such joy and was expecting this one to be along the same lines.  Looking at it just as a book, it is good writing, it is well put together, and it does make one think. It’s just that, in my case, it had me thinking that it was all wrong.  I guess it is more my fault for wanting it, rather than Khoury's, because I thought that this book would be in a similar vein and style, crediting the reader with an obvious brain, instead of preaching about things that are so far out of the realm of possibility and reality that it makes you not want to finish the book.