Knights Against Monks

The Templar Detective and the Unholy Exorcist by J. Robert Kennedy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first book by this prolific author.

I liked it okay. I'd say this was a pretty good 3, even a 3 1/2, but it's too much a pulp-fiction novel for me to bump it to a 4 or 5. The language makes it a quick read, but it doesn't evoke Medieval France in any way. (It kinda reads as if modern Americans were dropped into the story.) There's a pretty good attempt at being accurate about history, about knights and the Church and so on, but I don't think much of the history would stand up to rigorous criticism. And all that's okay, as it's just supposed to be fun and quick and full of action, which it is. Good pacing. Straightforward language. Decent stakes. It's entertaining, which is what I hoped for.

The characters are mostly sketched rather than fully developed, but it works for the genre, and the writer (who's sold a bunch of books) is genuinely good at keeping the prose punchy and the plot moving along. The chapters are short at about three pages usually, with lots of POV characters, and even if one POV or part of the story doesn't interest you, the scene jumps every few pages, keeping it rolling. The premise of the series is fun, too, with a group of Templars who solve mysteries. In this one, young women are being abducted by a priest and some monks, supposedly to exorcise demons, and it's the Templars' job to track down a young woman they know, along with others, and determine who is behind the abductions and why.

A good novel? Not really, not in my opinion. A fun read, though? Yeah, I'd say so.

Recommended for readers of action and pulp fiction.

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