For three hundred pages, it is essentially the usual romantic comedy Levy. Many dialogs, often teasing banter or not well wicked, with lots of allusions to their young family problems or lovers (She: I miss my father, my sister Jeanne fails me, my adopted son Harry almost fails me - him: Keira, it's you that I miss - the friend Walter: Miss Jenkins miss - the mother of Adrian: when will you get married - the Aunt Helena: in what color do I paint my store?). Many filling, but that Mr. Levy can do. As is written large with plenty of chapters of two pages (only one word), it reads quickly.
We also learn that Keira has found in Ethiopia a mysterious ancient artifact really amazing and just as a mysterious secret society with agents around the world is interested. We will never know who they really are and why this organization was created (Levy will tell us anything about it), but we discover that they want to prevent the world to learn the secret on which our heroes investigate. Which is in itself surprising, given that they ignore themselves what is this secret (only Adrian and Keira will guess at the end of the second novel) or even if there is a secret (only one of them, Ivory, believes, which earned him jeers of the other group members). Better not try to understand.
Finally, after 300 pages, archaeological quest begins. Irresistibly, we think of Scrooge and his nephews going in search of the lost city (with the mysterious unknown in the role of Rapetous). Driven by an extraordinary intuition, our heroes travel the world, but you never see very clearly why they go here and there.
No Spoiler, give an example: Adrian and Keira decipher an ancient text sending them on the trail of "hidden pyramids". Our elite archaeologist borrows a book on the subject and discovered that there are pyramids in Egypt, Mexico and China. The pyramids of Egypt and Mexico being visited by tourists (in our time, not when the text was written) and is therefore not enough "hidden", they decide to leave for China (Chinese pyramids are of course not "hidden" for the Chinese, they are just less known among us).
Funny method, you might say. But as is Levy who decides what is delusional speculation or brilliant intuition, let us be reassured that they will discover a clue left by the Chinese Bronze Age, to clear all the way, provided it is professional astronomer and has access to a mainframe-type NASA or Pentagon, which admit, was to be rare in ancient China. Levy a joke?
Best of all, note that in the next volume, we learn that the old date of 3500 BC text. JC, so before the Egyptian pyramids (2800 BC.) And of course before that of China, built in the Qin and Han (after 300 BC.), But a ridiculous detail does not stop Mr. Levy . Moreover, those of Mexico are more recent and that did not impress either. In fact, it is true that during the drafting of the text, these pyramids were nonexistent, so well in fact "hidden".
And so it continues, punctuated by passages where Rapetous .... sorry, I mean the leaders of the secret society of the Masters of the World, are wondering if they have done well not to eliminate immediately researchers who approaching so fast the terrible truth (remember they ignore what is this truth).
Marc Levy is a storyteller, tell me is it, one could forgive a few minor errors in the details. But in this book, it accumulates against blatant falsehoods, that a simple check of one hour on Wikipedia would have avoided him. Its basic plot is never credible. The motivations of the protagonists are equally ridiculous (especially for the Masters of the World) and the story becomes therefore uninteresting.
