A good beach read (without the beach)

Even though I can't remember the last time I was anywhere near a beach for swimming and soaking up rays, I still try to find a good, mindless beach read every summer. Back when the fuss over The DaVinci Code was still building, I read Dan Brown's earlier book Angels & Demons and, though the writing was terrible, I stuck with it for the labyrinthine plot about art, science, and religion, and the satisfying twists and turns in the chase. (However, I did realize I never need to read another book by him--I'll just wait for the movies.) I spent two summers back when I was teaching reading Atlas Shrugged, half one summer and half the next. I don't like Rand's philosophy, but the baroque and melodramatic writing style was oddly compelling: big "narrative arc" sections of national reach and great import (and exposition) alternating with long, incredibly overwrought scenes of two people talking (philosophizing, fighting, loving)--completely unrealistic but fascinating. I was also amazed that I could put the book down on September 1st and pick it back up on May 15th of the next year and not be lost in the story.

This year, it was The Lost Army of Cambyses by Paul Sussman, much closer to Brown than Rand. Tara, the daughter of a famous archaeologist, comes to Egypt to visit her father and finds him dead, and also finds a tantalizing fragment of an ancient wall that could reveal the whereabouts of a fabled site where, over 2000 years ago, an entire army perished in a sandstorm. A terrorist is after the fragment, hoping to find the site, plunder it of its treasures, and bankroll more of his terror operations. Some shady men at the British Embassy are also interested in the find, as is an Egyptian police inspector who has personal reasons to seek revenge against the terrorist. Finally, Tara's old flame shows up; he ditched her years ago because his career was more important than she was, but he seems ready to make up for lost time by helping her find the army site.

The writing is quite pedestrian (though not as bad as Brown's) but the setting is atmospheric, the set-up is interesting and, in the post-DaVinci Code era of pulp fiction, sneaky plot twists abound, with very few of the characters being exactly what they seem on the surface. I am a little ashamed to say that almost every single twist caught me by surprise, but on the other hand, there is a great deal of pleasure in not seeing these things coming, especially when the writer is generally playing fair. Only once was I disappointed in an M. Night Shyamalan trick in which part of a character's background is deliberately withheld from us for no good reason other than to give us a surprise near the end--as opposed to the fairer withholding of another character's motivations, fair because most of the other characters aren't aware of them, either. With summer not even half over, I might consider reading Sussman's more recent thriller, The Last Secret of the Temple.