[.ca] City of Dreams (ISBN 1576834999)

Subtleties Aside!:
I'm a longtime Lawhead fan. He is a master of scene and setting. His writing is full of the real-life struggle many of us face in our faith. With these attributes in mind, I looked forward to this new series. The idea is straightforward. The gospel story is dropped into a near-future setting, with New York City as the primary background. Alex Hunter, an agent for an international group called ICON, is hot on the tail of religious extremists. When one of the extremist leaders is murdered, Hunter is drawn deeper into this violent web. Sounds promising, but it devolves quickly into a transparent tale. The danger of retelling the gospel story is that we already know what's going to happen. New ideas and subtleties are necessary to keep us involved and to give us fresh perspective. Unfortunately, for me, this was predictable and stale. I wanted to like it, but I found myself skimming pages, waiting for something unexpected, for a new twist. When I ran into the NY governor, named, you guessed it, Pilate...I groaned aloud. For a quicker read, I'd suggest the graphic comic book version.

No stars at all for this tripe:
This is one of the most poorly written books I've ever tried to read. The writing is pedantic at best. Frankly, I couldn't finish this piece of crap. The cover blurbs made it sound interesting, so I decided to try it. Wrong move on my part. There are too many well-written books around to waste your time with this thing. I didn't know it was supposed to be a "christian" book until I read the reviews here. I couldn't force myself to read enough of it to find any christian propaganda. I can't believe any reviewer here can honestly think this is good writing. If you do, you really need to read some decent literature for a change, not just stuff mass-marketed to sheeple. WWJB - what would jesus buy. So sad.

Needs some touch up work:
Not a bad story line, not really a bad book. But in a couple of places I found some bad editing (the word "what" was used where the word "that" should have been). I also left the book thinking that there was more time to set development than character development. I still dont know all that much about Hunter or what makes him tick (beside wanting to be promoted back to a higher rank that appears to have been stripped from him early in the book), I think I know more about the Antagonist (Simon) than I do the main character of the book. But over all, its worth the quick read.

AWSOME BOOK!:
This is a wonderful book, read it and find out, as there slogan goes, "What if he were born in Bethlehem, Pennsylania?" This is just the intrductery book so you won't see to much of Hero till the end, but you can follow Hunter and see how he got in such deep *&*%.

A comic book without pictures:
The story seems interesting, and it is. But it's not written well. The Lawheads were trying too hard to make Hunter into a hard-nosed agent and were explaining too much. Like when someone mentioned a terrorist organization they belonged too, they made it a point that Hunter filed that away in his mind so he'd remember it. Well, no duh he would! Also, there is really only one plot line - the one described above. There are no subplots at all! So, basically, it's like a comic book, but with no pictures. And the names were sometimes groaners - instead of John the Baptist, it's "Washer John"; "Pilate" is the last name of the governor of New York; instead of Mary Magdalene it's "Maggie"; and Nicodemus is shortened to Nick. You get the idea . I think the graphic novel is a better choice than the novel trilogy.