The guild of historical novelists, if there is such a thing, might debate his professional ethics; I am not sure, however, that they differ much from Shakespeare's or Alexandre Dumas's. ...the plot draws much of its "truthiness" from the perennial suspicion of Roman Catholics among Protestant, English-speaking Europeans and Americans. According to Baigent and colleagues, the Orthodox and later Catholic Churches have engaged in a 2,000-year cover-up of the fact that Jesus did not die on the cross, that he and his wife Mary Magdalene absconded from Judea and in the course of time bequeathed their hidden heritage to the Merovingian kings of France, the Knights Templar, assorted authors of medieval romance, the Freemasons, and so on-basically, everyone was in on it, but no one knew about it. ...it is not surprising that as young men surpass their mothers in strength and status, they feel a certain ambivalent guilt rooted in the early mother-son relationship.14 And it is not surprising that young women, no longer the equals of their male peers in size, social prestige, and power, imagine that once things were different. ...the book appears aimed more at teenage than adult readers, perhaps like the old Encyclopedia Brown detective series by the late Donald J. Sobol. 4.