In this tale of magic and mystery, of love and danger, Balthasar's ultimate quest is to find the secret that could save the world.

A wonderful tale set in 1665 involves the hunt for a rare book called "The Hundreth Name"

RELEASE NOTES:

Released at meetup at Beanscene

I picked this up at the meet tonight. I've only read the first few pages and I'm hooked already :-) Thanks for sharing MMJohnston.

I did enjoy reading this book. It reminded me a lot of The Dumas Club - probably because it involves a search for a book as well.

At first, the diary style of writing did annoy me. However, the structure of having three notebooks appealed to me. Also, the search for the book merely served as a backdrop to Balthasar's adventures. I was chuffed he ended up in London as I was studying this period in Scottish history last semester. The book mentions the rumours that Charles II was a closet Catholic.

An interesting part is that September 11th is mentioned as being one of the possible dates for the end of the world. The book was published in 2000. Weird.

One thing that bothered me - why did Marta agree to stay with her husband? There were too many problems if she chose Balthasar but I can't understand why she wanted to stay with her husband. One of the disadvantages of this being a first person narrative ;-)

I bought this book in a charity shop on Great Western Road in Glasgow last week (and so liberated it from ethical commerce!) - I'm reading it at the moment and really enjoying it - it's a compelling first-person narrative - a sort of mystical travelogue concerned with the end of the world and the number of the beast, and the narrator himself, Balthasar, is an appealing character. As I believe this book should be back in the wild once I've read it, and as I note it has yet to leave Glasgow, I plan to take it to South Wales with me for Christmas and leave it somewhere there. I hope whoever finds it enjoys it and registers here so I can find out where it ends up.