Review Rating
With the October 2004 review, we began rating the books on the basis of one to four trowels;
one trowel= don’t bother, to four trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
Golden Oldies - reviewing previously unreviewed books by previously reviewed “greatest hits” authors!
As we celebrate twenty-five years of the MVAC reviews of archaeological fiction, I thought it would be fun to re-visit six of the authors whose works have been reviewed in the past. Three of these authors have sadly passed away since I first reviewed them (Margot Arnold, Lynn Hamilton, and Elizabeth Peters); two have “retired” their archaeologist protagonists, Gideon Oliver (Aaron Elkins), and Emma Fielding (Dana Cameron); and one, (Kate Ellis) continues to put DI Wesley Peterson and his friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, in harm’s way as solve contemporary crimes that have their roots in the distant past. While these authors have been reviewed previously, these books have not.
The Einstein Prophecy by Robert Masello
Reviewed on: August 1, 2026
47North: Seattle
2015 (PB)
For more than 150 years, authors including M R James, James Buchan and Arthur Conan Doyle have created mesmerizing works of fiction that blend archaeology and the supernatural. Robert Masello’s The Einstein Prophecy can now be added to that list.
The opening scenes are set in August of 1944—two months into the D-Day invasion of western Europe. Lieutenant Lucas Athan and Private Teddy Toussaint are infiltrating the still enemy-infested countryside of Alsace-Lorraine in advance of the Allies. Their mission as part of the Cultural Recovery Commission (CRC) is to find, preserve and protect artistic treasures looted by the Nazis. The CRC, by the way, is a fictionalized creation loosely based on the Monuments Men, a cadre of museum directors, curators and art historians who accompanied the Allied forces to rescue artworks plundered by the Nazis.
Athan and Toussaint’s present orders were an odd departure from standard operating procedure—coming from the Office of Strategic Service (the World War 2 predecessor to the post-war CIA) rather than the CRC. They were to locate an Egyptian sarcophagus looted from the Cairo Museum by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The sarcophagus, along with a sizeable cache of antiquities was ultimately destined for Hitler’s mountaintop retreat at Berchtesgaden but was hidden from the advancing Allies in a local Lorraine iron mine along with a sizeable cache of antiquities. They stumbled upon a hideously desiccated corpse near the sarcophagus just as a tripwire set off a land mine that seriously injured both Americans. A month later Lucas had been mustered out of the armed services, suffering a lost eye and other lesser injuries, and was once again a professor of art history at Princeton University. He was also delighted to find that Albert Einstein, who held a professorship in theoretical physics at Princeton since fleeing Nazi Germany, had just moved into a home across the street from his boarding house.
Meanwhile archaeologist Simone Rashid, Oxford Ph.D., as well as employee of the Egyptian Department of Cultural Affairs, and her father Abdul Rashid, a leading expert on Egyptian antiquity at the University of Cairo, were sailing on a Red Cross ship for America. Simone had discovered that the ship carried, in addition to the wounded victims of war, an Egyptian sarcophagus salvaged from an iron mine in Alsace-Lorraine. She and her father had originally discovered the burial box, bound with iron chains, buried in the sands of the Sahara. It was transported to Cairo but they were unable to investigate its mysteries before the Nazis appropriated it. Simone finds that the sarcophagus was marked for OSS “Priority A-1,” to be delivered to Professor Lucas Athan, Princeton University.
After a rather tumultuous introduction, Lucas and Simone join forces to investigate the funerary box, still secured by iron chains, but now resting in the storage area of the campus art museum. Simone relates how her father had painstakingly researched the object, even after its removal by the Nazis—that papyrus documents he discovered in the Cairo Museum, as well as documents buried with the sarcophagus in the desert, hinted at secrets Lucas could never imagine. The ancient writings strongly suggested that she and her father had unearthed the true tomb of St. Anthony the Anchorite—quite literally the father of Christian monasticism. Further, that Anthony wrestled with demons who tried to make him renounce God and surrender to worldly temptations. Other portrayals of crude scenes of violence had been etched into the walls of the desert crypt.
While the rationalist scholar Lucas Athan finds these tales inconceivable, he quickly finds himself as well as those near and dear to him plunged into a nightmarish reality. When the crypt is finally opened, they find that it was indeed the final resting place of St. Anthony, but he was not buried alone! And what was buried with the sainted Anchorite has now been loosed on an unsuspecting world—a malignant world that Lucas’ neighbor, Albert Einstein, and his friend, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the Atom Bomb, fear is on the horizon.
Four trowels for this imaginative take on an alternate interpretation of the post-World War Two world—a world where the “good guys” won, but at what cost?
