The Metropolitan Affair

The description of this book checked a lot of boxes for me. Egyptology, prohibition era crime, forgeries, art deco era New York City... the parts that described these areas of my interest I liked. The rest... meh.

This book could have benefited from a good editor. It was about 100 pages too long and I noticed many sentences, paragraphs, and chapters that could have been put on the chopping block to benefit the book as a whole.

Every emotion, character, and relationship is exhaustively over explained so that it seems the author doesn't trust her readers to be able to read between the lines or interpret anything for themselves. This goes too for all the Christian metaphors, which were tolerable for most of the book but then became saccharine and ridiculous at the very end. You might as well have hit me over the head yelling, “GOD LOVES YOU—DON'T YOU GET IT?”

Then there are the characters. Lauren, the main female character, is hopelessly naive for a single thirty-something living in New York City with a PHD. She relies on Joe, the main male character, to protect her as the “guardian of her well-being”. These stereotypes wouldn't have been so annoying except that they are spelled out for you so many times. Then there's Lauren's relationship with her father where she shows no backbone in her desperate quest for love and approval. It borders on pathetic, which is not a trait I prefer in protagonists.

The book isn't terrible. But it definitely suffers from what I call the “Christian Art Problem” where the quality of the art is sacrificed for the sake of content deemed acceptable by impossible to please Christians. I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt when I realized it was published by Bethany House, but it proved my assumptions correct.

Anyone who likes the topic of Egyptology and is looking for a better adventure suspense series should read the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters.