Bristol House: A Novel by Beverly Swerling

Bristol House: A Novel. Beverly Swerling. Viking Adult. April 2013. 416 pp. hbk. ISBN #: 9780670025930.

Annie Kendall’s academic historian career has been at a standstill for ten years when she’s offered the chance of a lifetime, or so she sees it.  She is hired by Weinraub, the head of the Shalom Foundation, to travel to London and find secret treasures hidden by Giacomo the Lombard, also known as the Jew of Holbern.  These treasures are connected to the ancient Second Temple of Jerusalem.  But there’s a heaviness and threatening attitude from Weinraub that bothers Annie but not enough initially to stop her from taking the job.  She’ll have free room and board and she has three months to complete what is really an impossible task.  So it begins!

The first unsettling aspect of this job is that after her landlady leaves Annie begins hearing chanting and visually senses the presence of a monk in her temporary home.  She has this uncanny ability to sit down immediately after seeing something and drawing it precisely as if it were a posing model.  So imagine her shock when she meets a researcher and TV personality, Geoff Harris, who is writing a book about what he believes to be a looming disaster that will occur in Israel; Geoff looks exactly like the monk haunting her home.  Their relationship forms slowly; Annie is a recovering alcoholic and so doesn’t expect anyone to believe her actual experience of her haunted dwelling.  But Geoff is a fine judge of truthful or sham characters and comes to believe that Annie is conveying reality, including later scenes of hearing music, seeing things written on the misty bathroom mirror and much, much more.

Somehow Annie and Geoff, along with Geoff’s dying mother and another Rabbi, come to see that the Jew of Holbern’s hidden treasures are linked to the Catholic Church and a secret sect known as the True Obedience of Avignon, tracing back to the time of a terrible schism in the Church about who was the “real” Pope.  Are these relics connected with Judaism or Christianity? What seems to be pointing to the Middle East leads them on a long journey of finding clues accompanied by the actual account told by the Jew of Holbern and the monk of Avignon who are connected in ways the reader could never imagine!

Bristol House… is a terrific mystery, thriller, fantasy and/or work of historical fiction.  If you love a complicated puzzle or a great mystery, this is the book for you. The clues move along slowly but then the pace picks up and the reader has to pay careful attention to piece it all together as the tension grows and grows. If you love historical fiction, this is a book that suggests how fanaticism regarding history can become so delusional that it poses a dire threat to the present on a global scale.  All in all, a fine novel that deserves much attention, rave reviews, and best seller status! This reader hated for the story to end – I want to know more about Annie and Geoff and what adventures their future holds! Congratulations Beverly Swerling!