Seven Wonders

Jack Grady is a researcher who travels the globe Indiana Jones-style, exploring history firsthand in the hopes of confirming his theory that the Amazons were more than myth. But when his hermit brother Jeremy is murdered, Jack’s investigation uncovers something curious: Jeremy’s discovery of a strange connection between the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and those of the Modern World. What does this have to do with Jeremy’s death? What secret could be worth killing for?

Seven Wonders follows the globetrotting Da Vinci Code-model – murder plus ancient secret plus weirdo assassin plus scholarly adventure – and doubles down, offering two shadowy forces at work and two history-revising theories to pursue. Unfortunately, trying to pack so much plot, backstory, and historical inspiration into the novel proves to be a burden, leaving the read itself strangely underwhelming.

Jack’s associates are plot devices rather than characters, and the second shadowy organization receives so little explanation that it becomes annoying instead of intriguing. Perhaps Mezrich intends to flesh out some of the forces at work here in subsequent novels, but for right now, the missteps muddy the plot rather than hinting at a larger, more complex world.