A thriller about Arab terrorists, the wreck of the Titanic, and the most famous book locked in her wreckage, the jeweled copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

The Rubaiyat, also known as the Great Omar, was a fabulously jeweled binding created by one of the most famous bookbinders in history, Francis Sangorski. Even at the time of its creation, the book was worth a fortune. Legend has it that the book was shipped to America on Titanic and was lost when the ship foundered on its maiden voyage. If the Great Omar could be found, in today’s market its value would be priceless. The FBI learns that Arab terrorists have hired a team to dive to the wreck and find the book. They plan to use it to fund their extremist agendas. An American scientist, comrade of Dr. Robert Ballard, is hired to beat the terrorists to the wreck and recover the book first.

Thompson attempts to follow in the footsteps of authors like Cussler and Ludlum, with a rousing, action adventure yarn. And while all the elements of such a story are present, they somehow do not gel into the kind of exciting read you would expect from the material.

Not that there aren’t moments of pure poetry in Thompson’s writing. The prologue describing the birth of the iceberg in Baffin Bay is short, but powerful. The chapter describing the sinking of the Titanic is gut wrenching. Yet in the later chapters, when our hero dives to the wreck, it fades into the background as a sterile backdrop to the narrative.

By far, some of the strongest writing in the book is the extensive material on the history and creation of the Great Omar itself. If you have a love of books as beautiful objects, the first half of the novel is fascinating reading. The second half of the novel is the pure action/adventure stuff, and curiously, this is where the story slows to a crawl. It took me a whole month to wade through the latter half of the book. In addition, I found the resolution of the story very dissatisfying.

With thanks to Carole Lindsay for mentioning this book on ET.

For more information about this edition, go to the page on StrataGem's website.