Cipher Mysteries

Now here's something that doesn't pop up every day: ex-Mormon cipher fiction. In "Latter-Day Cipher", Latayne C. Scott has crafted quite an interesting piece of work, combining the US police procedural genre (where in this case the main protagonist is a female journalist parachuted in from outside) with a kind of veil-lifting piece on the inner workings of the Mormon ...

I hate to admit it, but Brett King's new book "The Radix" has very nearly pushed me over the edge as far as Voynich-themed novels go. OK, if you like your cipher mystery fiction spiced up with implausibly steel-chinned Secret Government Agency action heroes with PhD-level history credentials and who the US President just happens to owe a favour (basically ...

(I'll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don't have star ratings & I'm not one to hide what I'm thinking, so this connection shouldn't ...

OK, moving straight into confessional mode, I feel more than a touch ashamed that I haven't reviewed Chris Harris' Mappamundi loooong before now. But... even though I've read it twice, I still don't really know what to say about it. Let me explain... Sticking to the knitting, it's a fairly trite starting point to note that it's an historical adventure, with ...

Another day, another historical mystery airport novel to review, this time with Will Adams' protagonist Daniel Knox exercising his "outcast Egyptologist" mojo in and around Alexandria, Siwa etc. Will Knox be able to solve all the clues and use his exceptional underwater swimming skills to find Alexander The Great's fabulous (but lost) golden catafalque, or will the various people trying to kill him ...

In my opinion, cipher mystery-themed airport novels tend (as I wrote here a few days ago) to be written by (1) "Rack Pack" writers, (2) "Domain Experts", or (3) "Wannabe Screenwriters". Having read Steve Berry's book "The Templar Legacy" (2006) as a warm-up, I recently moved on to his "The Charlemagne Pursuit" (2008), where the serial use of the ...

Geraldine Brooks' novel "The People of the Book" (2008) tells the story of a (fictional) Australian book conservator called Hanna Heath, and her encounters with a (real) codex called the Sarajevo Haggadah. In this sense, it is very much akin to the Voynich Manuscript novels I review here, which typically use the mystery of the VMs as a ...

This is a weird one: The Voynich Enslavement by Hank Snow is a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-themed experimental novel, in an alternative society built around whipping, slaves, S&M and all that jazz. I'm hardly giving away my personal orientation to say that, ummm, this isn't really my bag: but there you go, it is what it is. The story stops after seven chapters ...

Back in January, I predicted that 2008 would be "the year of the Voynich" - not that it would get solved (don't be so ridiculous, tcha!), but rather that we would be engulfed in a semi-tsunami of Voynich-related fiction, a novelistic response to the VMs meme as it seeps into mainstream culture. And this wave has indeed hit the shore: my ...

I've mentioned Lev Grossman a few times on this blog (most notably here and here): so when I recently stumbled across a copy of his novel "Codex" (2004), I jumped at the opportunity to read it. (Thank you the charity shop by Virginia Water station). Though (strictly speaking) Codex isn't a cipher novel per se, its protagonists stumble uncertainly through ...