I have absolutely no interest in The Da Vinci Code or any books of that sort, but I picked this up for two reasons: my last name is Cato, and it was only $2 for a hardcover at the Phoenix VNSA sale. Personally relevant and cheap!

I was pleasantly surprised by this massive book. Once it got going, I was completely snared. The main character, Ottavia, is a high-ranking nun working in the Vatican. She specializes in ancient manuscripts and research, and therefore she's stunned when her superiors need her expertise in a new assignment - identifying unusual tattoos on the corpse of a dead Ethiopian. To complicate things more, the dead man was carrying along bits of the True Cross - the one Jesus died upon - and bears scarification that suggests a long-lost religious order may not be lost after all. Along with a stoic Swiss Army captain and brilliant Coptic Egyptian, the three of them work through linguistic riddles and discover the key to everything is hidden in plain sight - Dante's The Divine Comedy. As other churches around the world reel from the theft of their fragments of the Cross, Ottavia and the others rush to join this hidden order so they can stop the pilfering and confront the enigmatic leader of the group, Cato.

Reading the book reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This is an intelligent, well-researched book and it was a great deal of fun. The ending had a nice twist that was followed by a bit of a cliche, but that was fine. I was concerned that I'd go through all 458-pages and be disgusted by the ending, as I was recently with Edgar Sawtelle, but that wasn't the case here. It ended like it should. I have no regrets about this $2 purchase. ( )

I am definately going to abandon this particular thriller genre where an object of great historical signifigance -- in this case fragments of 'Lignum Crucis,' the wood of the cross on which Christ was crucified -- launch our protagonists on an international adventure. These stories almost always disappoint me in the end.

Our narrator is a nun who is swept up in this mystery - she and her colleagues (one of whom she so predictably falls in love with) use Dante's Divine Commedy as a guide to passing initiation rights and gleaning the location of the true cross. If this sounds ridiculous . . . it's because it is.

I did enjoy the plethora of history about the Ancient world, early Christianity, and the Byzantine Empire - truly it is the one thing that perhaps made it worth reading. But the prose and dialogue were wooden making it easy to put the book down down or drift off even during the ostensibly exciting parts.

Oh Well - as I said, last of this genre for me. A generous 3 stars. ( )

Better than the 'DaVinci Code' but that's not saying alot. The book works up until the last few chapters, then it suffers the same flaw as 'The Divine Comedy' - writing about paradise is less interesting than hell. But that is one kickass nun! ( )

Great story involving a Professor, a Nun and a Swiss Guard Captain seeking out, on behalf of the Vatican, the secret sect that is stealing Christian relics. With Dante's Divine Comedy as their guide they negotiate all manner of tests in the pursuit. I found it to be an easy and enjoyable read. There is some predictability but also plenty of surprises. Overall its very well written - although I think that the translation into English stumbled in a couple of spots. ( )

The action is great and the development of the story keeps you on your toes. So glad it was translated into English ( )

Following in the Da Vinci Code tradition of church secrets, but better done. The characters are drawn more fully, and the plot more compelling. I would recommend this as a superior beach read.

http://www.webboom.pt/ficha.asp?ID=11... ( )

http://dhamel.typepad.com/book_blog/2... ( )

It would be easy to pass Matilde Asensi's The Last Cato off as another of the myriad Da Vinci Code clones flooding the book-market today. Unfortunately, since this book was published in Spain back in 2001 (well before the antics of Robert Langdon rocketed Dan Brown to the top of the bestseller lists), Asensi's work isn't quite as easily ignored. Published in English for the first time this year by Rayo (a HarperCollins imprint), The Last Cato is very much in the same genre as Da Vinci, The Rule of Four, and all the others which use classical literature to uncover modern-day misdeeds.

In this case, the misdeeds are a string of thefts from churches around the world - thefts of the various slivers and chunks of the "True Cross." The culprits: the mysterious Staurofilakes, a mysterical brotherhood charged with protecting the Cross when it was whole. But why are they now collecting the pieces? Answering that question becomes the job of an unlikely team: Ottavia Salina, a scholarly nun who works in the Vatican Archives; Kasper Glauser-Roist, a meaty Swiss Guard and Vatican "consigliere" (in the Godfather sense); and Farag Boswell, an ethnically-mixed archaeologist from Egypt.

The trio set off on a bizarre but entirely expected quest through the route that aspiring Staurofilakes must take to prove themselves worthy of the honor. Their road map? Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio, which contains the clues they need to make their way from city to city and survive the challenges that await them there. Dante, you see, was himself one of these Staurofilax characters (although how no one ever noticed the sect's ritual scarifications on him remains undisclosed), and using his text, Salina and the others go on their not-so-merry way, &c. &c. I won't say any more and spoil the plot, but you get the drift.

I must say that within this genre, The Last Cato is one of the better examples I've read. Unfortunately that's not saying all that much. While I found the fairly lengthy explications of early church history and True Cross lore somewhat appealing, it would be nice to know what's real and what Asensi's making up (the lack of a "Historical Note" is one of the major faults, even if it was nice to see her footnoting some of the various quotations she uses in the text). The writing and/or the translation is uneven, which creates some weird Spanishized Latin names that haven't been rendered back into English, along with a few rough patches of dialogue. I had (very) high hopes that the heroine's religious status would preclude the obligatory romantic subplot, but alas, it's here.

All in all, not an awful book (and perhaps slightly better than Da Vinci Code), but that's as far as I'll go.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/... ( )

I loved this book - have read it twice already and even pulled out my version of Dante ( )

I totally agree with this review. Clunky is a good word for this book. Maybe if you are more familiar with Dante than I am you would like it more than I did.
******
Kirkus Reviews This prolix thriller, the Spanish author's first English translation, substitutes Dante's poetry for Leonardo's painting as the basis for a plodding tale of byzantine intrigue.

Dr. Ottavia Salina is Super Nun. Helming the Vatican's Secret Archive, she's a world-renowned paleographer, master of dozens of dead languages, a sharp-tongued feminist and the darling daughter of a teeming famiglia straight out of mob-movie central casting. Asensi has given us, in fact, an ecclesiastical Jane Bond whose mission is to decipher the elaborate scarification on the corpse of an Ethiopian accused of mysterious, heinous crimes against the Church—seven kinds of crosses decorate his flesh and a Greek "sigma" is imprinted on his skull. Globetrotting in company with a hunky, brainiac Swiss Guard and an obligatorily eccentric archaeologist, Salina uncovers a secret society called The Staurofilakes. Headed by the Cato, a kind of heretical Darth Vader, the subterranean order has stirred the pope's ire by stealing the holiest of relics—bits of the True Cross upon which Jesus was crucified. Further, elaborate skullduggery is required before Salina and crew finally happen upon a key to tracking down the Cato: the Purgatorio of Dante's Divine Comedy. As readers wind through the maze of Asensi's plot, they may find riveting her detailed reviews of early church history, of crucifix lore and of Vatican politics. Indeed, such arcana is one of the novel's strengths. But paper-thin characterization, clunky prose, unnecessary footnotes (in a whodunit, no less), an unconvincing romance and, after a while, a tedious reading of Dante's spiritual classic as an extended game of Clue, seriously compromise this tale.
Unconvincing.
(Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2006) ( )

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/... ( )