The Geographer’s Library

Another of the many “historical suspense” novels capitalizing on the success of the Da Vinci Code, The Geographer’s Library is the debut novel from Jon Fasman. I rarely pick up a book on a whim without doing some research first, but I was in the libary the other day and this book was featured in the New Fiction section, and something about it made me take it home.

Fasman has crafted an interesting story that is really two books in one — a current day tale centering around a small-town journalist investigating the death of a mysterious professor, and the story of the “library” of the famous philosopher Al-Idrisi, a collection of priceless objects that have been scattered around the world and may or may not have mystical powers.

The story surrounding current day journalist Paul Tomm is highly absorbing, a well-crafted page turner that unfortunately only takes up about half of this novel. The “library” portion is bloated and overlong, and most disturbingly completely unnecessary. One expects that, after having struggled through pages of nonsense related to this so-called library, that at the very least it will have provided key details to the story’s resolution, but that fails to happen. It really is a shame, because I enjoyed the majority of this novel only to be let down at the very end.

A decent debut for Fasman and not a bad way to spend your time, but doesn’t quite live up to its potential.