Tag: fitness

Roman Piso, Piso Christ (Trafford Publishing 2010)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10002273-piso-christ

Tricks with names and numbers, utter poppycock

This book contends that Jesus was invented by (the fictionally invented) Arrius Calpurnius Piso masquerading as Flavius Josephus. The New Testament was not the story of Jesus but rather a satire on the military campaign of Titus. A great historical conspiracy perpetrated by the ruling class in order to hoodwink the rest of us. The author doesn’t reveal his real name out of fear that people will kill him.
Not only was ACP writing under the pseudonym of Flavius Josephus, he was Dio Chrysostom, also Philo, Epictetus and Plutarch—hey, why not Shakespeare in the bargain? He was also the Antonius Primus who killed Vitellius, and Claudius Aristion, Maturus Arrianus, Curtius Montanus and Flavius Archippus. These multiple aliases would have had the man living in Rome, Prusa, Ephesus, Altinum, Athens and Crete all at the same time.
Seneca and Lucius Piso wrote the Gospel of Mark. Arrius Piso’s son Justus was Justin Martyr. Eusebius was really Constantine’s brother, Pliny was really St Paul, Suetonius was Antoninus Pius.
We plebs have had the wool pulled over our eyes for two millennia, as is ‘revealed’ using secret codename aliases and gematria (numerology), which I discount as proving anything sensible. It gets even loonier with discussion of so-called ‘royal language’ (e.g. made-up linguistics like Annius is really Arrius, because they changed the Rs to Ns). Entire chapters are devoted to the supposed dirty double entendres in early Christian writings—e.g. whenever the Gospels said ‘walked’ they really meant ‘have sex’; the ‘seven trumpets’ of Rev. 8:2 is about church leaders farting.
I’ve always wanted to examine the Jesus-never-existed conspiracy theory, and now I have. Utter poppycock.

Poppy Cooper, A Post Office Christmas (Hodder & Stoughton 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57199727-a-post-office-christmas?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GCAzMqpNNH&rank=1

1915. With Christmas approaching, Post Office Girls, Milly, Nora and Liza, are working harder than ever at the Home Depot to get letters and parcels to the troops on the front line.

Milly is transferred to a different department. Was it because of her poor background? Her suffragist leanings put her out of sorts with her posher workmates. She misses her friends, but takes solace at her local suffragette group ELFS, and makes a new friend at work, ex-soldier Jack.

Coming home from a meeting, Milly is accosted by a drunken soldier and saved just in time by fellow suffragettes, Hilda and Elise. The police believe his side of the story.

Milly takes up the cause of a miscarriage of justice.

It makes one’s blood boil to remember how women were treated—the pay differential, being accosted in the street at night, not being listened to by police, having to sit in a separate section of the pub to avoid catcalls, always being the ones in charges of tea and refreshments—not to mention multiple children and the ever-present threat of the workhouse.

All the while, Sylvia Pankhurst has ruled ‘no militant action’ due to the war. But the ELFS ‘girls’ have better ideas, and Milly takes some people into her confidence that she shouldn’t have done.

The royal family’s visit goes off without a hitch, after Milly and Jack save the day. The jolly Christmas tale ends well, and revelries spill out onto Euston Road. Looks like our boys will be getting their parcels, after all.

It’s not often one finds a novel that deals with the working lives of working-class people—the ‘girls’ relationships with their workmates and supervisors, what they actually do in order to sort the post, how they spend their lunchbreaks.

This is Book 2 in the Post Office Girls series.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Neil Staley, The Warrior Gene (Kindle 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77776478-the-warrior-gene?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_31

Apex Labs agents Reg Thompson and Harry Caine are on a security stake-out, and a Fed from the FBI, Joshua Smith, is on a case nearby. He introduces himself, then shoots them in the head.
Back at the lab, Dr Alex Bishop’s boss Henry Drexler calls him to take a look at Batch DD-401A. ‘incomplete data utility’. Yet the client is moving forward the launch of Phase One.
A rhesus monkey named Jimmy is injected with ‘the Icarus particle’, and the moneymen watch as Jimmy viciously destroys an uninjected monkey.
There are numerous characters and minor inter-woven plotlines—the secret commemorative reward in the box, James Devlin’s promotion and abduction by his father and Blakenstock, two security agents murdered outside Alex’s lodgings, Mrs Galasky’s witness statement, the investigation against the religious cult leader, the fire at the lab, the flash drive and the other-worldly voice, Audrey’s backstabbing, the Mamluks and The Overwatch in the desert, Harun the Invisible Light—and that’s only up to chapter 16. At the final hour the ritual in the desert, Klick’s abusive religious cult and the warrior gene storylines converge.
The multiplicity of characters makes it hard to keep track—my brain protested at being introduced to a whole new set of characters in chapter 20. The ‘head-hopping’ (switching of Points of View) may be confusing, but it adds intrigue and gives the reader a chance to piece things together without having everything explained.
This novel is brilliant at creating suspense, using various skilful techniques as well as the old cliff-hanger. The science appears spot on—indeed, MAO-A has been called the ‘warrior gene’. The dialogue includes a perfect comeback to ‘age before beauty’—‘assholes before angels’.
I couldn’t understand the timeline of: James and his father’s boss Blakenstock giving him a big promotion, Blakenstock catching him in flagrante with a woman, and his massage (‘two hours later’ than the in flagrante). And what was the ‘giant fist smashing the building to the ground’ on page 161? And after Alex knew how evil the code was, why did he still want to save it?
The Concept—a techno/detective thriller involving the so-called ‘warrior gene’ is great. This follows in the tradition of techno-thrillers about scientifically engineered super-soldiers (Frank Herbert, Dune; Robert A Heinlein, Starship Troopers; Jeff Vintar, ‘Hardwired’ [iRobot]) and borrows the elite troop of Mamluks guarding secrets in the desert from ‘The Mummy’, the hole in the centre of the ceiling from ‘The Fifth Element’ and the ‘bloodline’ idea from The Da Vinci Code—all tropes too good to exclude.
The action is well paced using scene-setting and dialogue; the final chapters are a rollercoaster of excitement with a marvellous twist at the end. It would make a great action film.
This review first appeared in Reedsy Discovery.

S. W. Perry, The Sinner’s Mark (Corvus 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74836672-the-sinner-s-mark

Elizabethan mystery full of period character

Nicholas Shelby, the queens’ physician, is summoned. Queen Elizabeth is fading but is nevertheless still interested in ‘young men with good calves and passable looks’.

Shelby’s father is accused of distributing a seditious tract, and he is determined to clear his name. One of the suppliers of ingredients for wife Bianca’s simples, Aksel Leezen, has willed to her his house in the Steelyard. There, Leezen has left plaster casts of bones—écorché models, for studying anatomy, explains Nicholas—and a gruesome wooded effigy of a dead girl with half a face. Three young boys go missing.

An old war-buddy arrives—his marvellous name is Petrus Eusebius Schenk.

As Shakespeare’s players act the assassination of Julius Caesar, actors in another plot are laying dastardly plans. As well as the nods to the Gunpowder Plot, which would happen five years after the events in this story, there are bits that were inspired by real occurrences in Elizabethan London.

Dialogue is good, but we don’t really hear the voices of the characters. The Voice is that of omniscient narrator.

This is sixth in Perry’s Elizabethan Jackdaw Mysteries series, and we know Nicholas, Bianca, Rose and Ned from the earlier books. Their characters are further developed here, and necessary backstory is well handled.

The plot develops languidly, and the slow pace allows for character development and scene-setting and gives one a feeling of the period, when even a trip across London required a horse ride, a wherry across the river, a stay in an inn.

Another element comes across as true to the period—the schizophrenic and precarious nature of the religious ups and downs and the shifting goalposts on what was considered heresy. The character Ned voices the experience of someone newly inspired by revolutionary Protestant sermons, and Schenk’s zealotry is believable.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.