With Zionists popping up all over the place – even the Japanese have Zionists – it is not difficult to guess who is going to win.

It seems to be under a continual siege of unknown nature, by unknown forces, and it just goes right on whistling and shouting and howling and doing all kinds of things I have no control over. Early in the game it became apparent the playing styles of the three founders couldn't have been more different.

Arrested on accusations of witchcraft and treason, Chant finds himself trapped in a cold, filthy jail cell in a foreign land. The Great Jerusalem Poker Game, as it’s eventually known, continues for the next twelve years—the players unwilling to leave a competition whose prize is control of Jerusalem.

The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor", and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of: a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history. I was by way of thinking I already had started here, and what it amounts to is heavy lifting that's bloody hard on the back. The tone ranges from whimsical and funny to unsettling and depressing, in fact he resembles Heironymous Bosch in print when describing historical atrocities like the massacre at Smyrna or the Rape of Nanking. I completed the quartet, holding them as one of my fondest reading memories and spreading out each copy that I find for birthday's, Sinterklaas and Kerstmis, telling the receiver to have a taste of this. Much of the story development went into a wasted tangent that I found ponderous and revolting - not at all the mythic as emerging from the ordinary.By strict calculations at the top, one of those incomprehensible decisions made by Himself and passed on to my long-suffering mother and father, he being a poor fisherman who ate mostly potatoes and had thirty-three sons, me being the youngest and the last. A broad ranging story which spans decades and continents where characters paths intertwine like the fibres of a fine Persian carpet. Where the plot lost me was the digressions into the extended metaphorical references to various historical villains whom have vied for control over the Middle East, but failed miserably. D. James' electric debut novel, an ingeniously plotted mystery that immediately placed her among the masters of suspense.