Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore, The Last Secret

Journalist Cotten Stone is back in The Last Secret, the second installment in Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore's series of religious thrillers. The book starts with a deliciously suspenseful chapter: the pilot of a Virgin Atlantic Airbus announces his suicidal intentions mid-flight, prompting scrambling on the ground as a criminal psychologist tries to talk the pilot out of it, and scrambling in the air as two F-18 Hornets prepare to shoot the aircraft down. But the pilot's death is just the first we hear about in a worldwide rash of suicides, a phenomenon connected with an age-old battle between good and evil: the Nephilim, the fallen angels who signed on with Lucifer back in the day, are preparing for the Final Conflict and attempting to bolster their ranks with the souls of suicides while they can.

While the death toll mounts, Cotten Stone finds herself at an archaeological dig near Machu Picchu in Peru. An unusual artifact is unearthed, an elaborately incised crystal tablet which, evidence suggests, may have been inscribed by the hand of God. Readers coming to the series for the first time will be curious as to what makes Cotten Stone so special, a woman who has destroyed her career and her credibility with a stunt on a par with Geraldo Rivera's opening of Al Capone's vault. The authors do fill in Cotten's backstory eventually—let's just say she's unusually suited to the task of fighting evil—but they take their time doing so. Readers will have to wait some 150 pages to find out why Cotten is the Chosen One. But that's one of the things I liked about the book, that information revealed in The Grail Conspiracy is dribbled into the new story rather than dumped on readers in chunks of explanatory prose.

The Last Secret is told from multiple perspectives, among them that of the intriguing Lester Ripple, a nerdy, obsessive-compulsive scientific genius whose story is woven through the book until it intersects with Cotten's. I'm hoping Lester figures somehow in the next book in the series, Indigo Ruby, which is due out in September 2007.

Needless to say, I enjoyed The Last Secret. Like its predecessor in the series, it's a skillfully crafted page-turner with likable characters. I hope that Cotten Stone and her demon-fighting cronies are in for a long run.