Steve Barry is touted
as having millions of readers in multiple countries. I confess I have not been
among them. His The Omega Factor is a long, rather uneven, and
occasionally pedantic slog into the dark secrets perpetrated by the Catholic
church over the years. If you have read any Dan Brown, you know what I am
referring to. The church is fraught with venal, corrupt clergy and many secret underground
cults--some of which have been functioning for a thousand years or more. The
hero, Nick Lee, is some kind of United Nations employee in an area devoted to
lost or purloined artwork. He has a past that includes a prison stretch for
accidentally shooting a boyhood friend. Not much is made of this other than he
now has a hatred of guns. He is also absent from the book for long sections on
church history and some 14th century scenes that feature the painter
Jan Van Eyck’s spy career before he created his famous Ghent Altarpiece—an art
work that has had a checkered history over time.
In the current day, there is an art restorer named Kelsey. Conveniently,
nine years ago, she was about to marry Nick just before she changed her mind
and became a nun in a highly secretive order called the Maidens of St. Michael.
Kelsey discovers some overpainting on one of Van Eyck’s altarpiece panels and
Nick is traveling to see her when her art restoration studio is fire bombed. The
panel is destroyed, and another young member of the order is killed by the
Belgian police. Little is made of why a competent and sophisticated police
force would fill a young woman with bullets other than it was needed to further
the main plot, which now turns to the possession of a computer that has a
digital copy of the lost panel on it.
Enter now the Vatican’s group of scheming, venal Friars,
Bishops, and Cardinals to unravel the secret protected by the Maidens of St.
Michael. I trust you might be beginning to believe that I was on the verge of
quitting this hodgepodge a number of times. I wish I had.
Perhaps I got up on the wrong side of the bed, but I can
only give this one a bare two out of five stars.
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