THE THIRD GATE
By: Lincoln Child
Doubleday: New York City
2012 (HC)
Life after death is a thread common to many of the
world’s religions, past and present. In Egyptian mythology, Isis
reassembled the butchered remains of her husband/brother Osiris and
transformed him into the god of the underworld. The mummification of people
and animals, and the presence of grave goods in tombs of the deceased, may
in part be traced back to this mythology and may have influenced the ancient
Egyptians to direct so much of their energies—some would say obsess—on the
subject of death and the after-life.
It is this theme that Lincoln Child (one half of the
prolific thriller-writing partnership of Preston and Child) explores in this
solo effort.
Ethan Rush, a very successful and highly respected
anesthesiologist, nearly loses his wife after a horrific auto accident.
Despite her life signs flat lining for almost a quarter of an hour, she is
brought back to life, and because of this traumatic episode, Rush focuses
his research efforts on the subject of near-death experiences and
establishes the Center for Transmortality Studies (CTS) in rural
Connecticut. Rush enlists an old acquaintance and classmate at Johns
Hopkins University, Jeremy Logan—a professor of Medieval Studies at Yale and
a free-lance and self-styled “enigmologist”—to join him on a great adventure
that requires his unique gifts in investigating the arcane and cryptic.
The two join Porter Stone, a world-renowned
archaeologist (treasure hunter to his detractors) in the Egyptian Museum in
Cairo where Stone is conducting research on the last (and hitherto unknown)
quest of Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the great British
archaeologist whose illustrious career spanned the years from the late 19th
Century to almost the middle of the 20th. Hieroglyphic etchings
on an ostracon (a pottery fragment) hints that Narmer, the first king of a
united Upper and Lower Egypt (c.3200 BCE), was not buried in Abydos as had
always been believed, but that he was entombed where the Nile loses itself
in the Sudd, a remarkable geographic area in Sudan (in reality, in South
Sudan). The Sudd described by Child (and Allan Moorehead in his 1960
bestseller, The White Nile) is a vast floating malarial mire of
decaying vegetation, deadly creatures of Land and water, and mud more
treacherous than quicksand—a proverbial hellhole. While the real Sudd is
less terrifying than the one described by Lincoln Child, this is where
Porter Stone has constructed his floating research facility to search for
Narmer’s tomb. Christine Romero, the research team’s Egyptologist, finally
explains to Jeremy why he has been recruited to the effort: Narmer invoked
a curse on any and all who would violate his tomb. Dismissed out of hand at
the outset by the project scientists and technicians, a continuing plague of
mishaps –accidents, misplaced objects, equipment breakdowns—have begun to
spook the staff, and Porter Stone was convinced by Ethan Rush to bring
Jeremy and his occult talents on-board—just in case. The curse is an
extensive one that threatens increased suffering as each of the tomb’s three
gates is transgressed. Trespassing the Third and final Gate promises
that”…the black god of the deepest pit will seize him, and his limbs will be
scattered to the uttermost corners of the earth. And I, Narmer the
Everlasting, will torment him and his, by day and by night, waking and
sleeping, until madness and death become his eternal temple.”
The accidents and near-disasters continue to pile up
and Logan senses that, in fact, something very disturbing is taking place as
the researchers draw nearer to breaching the lost tomb of Narmer. He senses
a pervasive and malignant evil, almost a physical presence, around the site,
and he begins to speculate that perhaps Narmer established his final resting
place so far from his beloved Egypt to protect it from something buried with
him! When Jeremy discovers that Ethan Rush’s wife Jennifer, still obviously
showing emotional scars from her tragic near-death trauma, is a quiet
presence at the research facility, he also begins to wonder if
archaeological discovery is the only, or even the main, purpose of the
Narmer expedition.
The pace of the novel picks up with every turn of the
page and unsettling surprises await the reader as gate after gate of
Narmer’s tomb is violated. This is good, old-fashioned thriller fiction at
its best—a great read for a cold winter weekend. Three trowels for The
Third Gate.
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