By Alafair Burke
Henry Holt & Co.
Hardcover and Paperback Editions

Captain Jack West, Jr., is searching for the missing top of the Great Pyramid. Legend has it that this ancient Capstone was broken into seven pieces and hidden inside the Seven Ancient Wonders by Alexander the Great. It was said that anyone who collected all seven pieces and performed a special ritual on a special day would rule the Earth for a thousand years.

But the problem was that most of the Ancient Wonders had been lost long ago. America and Europe were in a race to find the lost Wonders, the missing Capstone and unlock the power it held.

Seven Deadly Wonders Excerpt West emerged from the ceiling at one end of a long, stone-walled room, hanging from his drop rope. He did not lower himself all the way to the floor, just kept hanging about eight feet above it. By the eerie yellow light of his original glowstick, he beheld a rectangular room about 98 feet long. The room's floor was covered by a shallow layer of swamp water, water that was absolutely crawling with Nile crocodiles--not an inch of floor space was crocodile-free. © Matthew Reilly Published with permission from Simon & Schuster

But a small group of nations, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Spain, joined forces and created a small commando team, lead by Australian Captain West, in a desperate attempt to block any one nation from gaining ultimate power.

Their only hope lay in a ten-year-old girl named Lily, whom West had rescued from a volcano as an infant. She was the direct descendant of the Oracle of Siwa and only someone in the Oracle's bloodline could decipher the ancient language that revealed the location of Capstone pieces. But she had a twin brother named Alexander who had been groomed from birth by the cruel Jesuit Priest Francisco del Piero who led the nations of mainland Europe and the Catholic Church.

The Americans did not have an Oracle but they did have everything else: money, resources and the leadership of the cunning and ruthless Marshall Judah, West's one-time mentor. For West and his team, it's a race against time and against the two most powerful political forces on Earth and fate of human kind hung in the balance.

Bookworm's Briefing
The one thing that Seven Deadly Wonders has in abundance is enthusiasm. It does not, however, have anything close to a believable human character.

The dialogue is wooden, the character arcs painfully stereotypical or else nonexistent. It appears that an enormous amount of research went into this book, which is unfortunate, since it is positively riddled with tiny inaccuracies that continually undermine the reader's trust in the author (for example, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church are not the same entity).

The only point of interest in this book is the perspective that the Australian author brings to global politics. It was somewhat interesting to read an essentially brainless Hollywood-esque story in which America was cast as the "bad guys."