Gosh it's amazing the drivel that gets published. I'm just glad I didn't pay good money for this. Think The Da Vinci Code combined with Raiders of the Lost Ark but about one-quarter as good as those and you have an idea of the plot. ( )

A fan of The Da Vinci Code, or any of the sub-genre it spawned, might pick this book up and think "hmm, this looks right up my alley." They'd be right, but they'd also be sadly disappointed, unless they happened to be fourteen years old. Because this book would be better served calling itself YA, or even Childrens.

Tom Martin is a pale imitation of Dan Brown, and possesses none of his story-writing skills. It's a half-decent idea, but the execution is clumsy. The prose is ham-fisted and the characters are two-dimensional and unconvincing (a college professor, world expert in his field, needs to have longitude and latitude explained to him? Really?)

If you're a fan of the Da Vinci Code sub-genre, do yourself a favour and skip this one, and check out something by Scott Mariani, James Rollins, or Steve Berry instead. ( )

Kent, um importante professor de Oxford, é encontrado morto nas montanhas peruanas próximas à cidade de Machu Picchu. A jovem professora Catherine Donovan recebe a notícia ao chegar a Oxford, mas não consegue entender como um homem tão gentil, alguém que ela conhecia tão bem, poderia estar morto. Principalmente porque, pouco antes de ouvir a notícia da morte, ela havia recebido cópias de importantes mapas antigos e uma misteriosa sequência numérica. Para desvendar o enigma, Catherine procura a ajuda de um especialista em mitologia, James Rutheford, e, juntos, partem para o Peru a fim de seguir as pistas deixadas pelo professor Kent. Porém, os dois não esperavam ter de enfrentar uma misteriosa - e poderosa - organização que fará de tudo para impedi-los. A dupla, então, deve correr contra o tempo para desvendar os mistérios e evitar que se transformem nas próximas vítimas. Será que as pistas deixadas pelo professor são realmente informações sobre um iminente cataclisma ou não passam de uma armadilha que colocará a vida de Catherine e James em perigo? ( )

Oh gosh, I must admit that pyramid is a pretty dire book: poor plot, badly written and weak characters. However I have to recommend it for one thing only – no, not the gematria or the descriptions of Peruvian cities which I have heard are grossly inaccurate anyway – and that is the maps.

Like most people, I love old maps and find the history of cartography fascinating. While Pyramid does not pay homage to those unbelievably brave people who set out over a sea they believed might end suddenly in a mighty waterfall off the end of the world is does deal with early maps.

The thesis behind the book – a mishmash of international conspiracy, global warming, ancient master races and half-baked mythologies – is that an advanced race of people lived on the Antarctic continent but when the tectonic plates shifted their previously habitable land become iced up, forcing them to form a Diaspora, scattering to those parts of the world least likely to be affected by flooding.

Some lamentably ignorant Oxford Dons – a hot American babe and a sexy English gent just to keep the whole thing pc – stumble across a plan to harness the tectonic energy of the earth using pyramids and ley lines and all sorts of complex things which I must admit I skimmed over. A sinister corporation is out to stop them finding more and the pair is pursued from England to Peru, Bolivia, America and finally Egypt, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake, as the cliché has it.

Anyway, back to the maps. The Piri Reis map is apparently quite famous: it dates back to roughly 1513 and was discovered in the Topkapi palace in the 20th Century when the building was being transformed into a museum. It is an early and remarkably accurate – for the time – map of the world.

What makes it special however is that it appears to chart the Antarctic not only centuries before it was discovered but it charts it in an ice-free condition, which would make the map at least 6000 years old. Because the map allegedly contains details no European could have known in the 1500's, Martin argues that it proves the existence of ancient technological civilizations.

“In response to people who ask how to explain why the Piri Reis Map shows the coastline of Antarctica accurately, the answer is - it doesn't. It especially doesn't show the sub glacial coastline of Antarctica, which corresponds to the existing coastline of Antarctica around most of the continent anyway.” [World Mysteries.com]

The author uses counter-knowledge to ’prove’ the existence of an ancient civilisation and Polar Shifting. But its all good – just a pity he did not do a more interesting job of it. I’d love to read more books posited on old maps. ( )

Pretty poor to say the least. Two unsuspecting academics are forced to save the world by preventing the Great Pyramid at Giza being used for it's intended purpose - controlling the Earth's magnetic field. To call this far-fetched would be an understatement. A really bad example of a genre still riding on Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code coat-tails. The only credit this book deserves is that I actually managed to finish it and din't give up halfway through. I don't think I'll be reading anything by else by this author. ( )