A strange book, often boring, but with a single fascinating idea. It's not a crime-story or a mystery novel, because there is no real mystery to solve.
The story: Will Piper, Fbi, must solve the case of the Doomsday killer: some people receive a postcard with a grave drawing and the date of their death, and that exact day they all die. It's a difficult case, because every death seems so different: a robbery, a suicide, even a natural death apparently, but those postcards link them all.
At some point it turns out that Doomsday doesn't exist, there was no serial killer, and this is clear quite early in the book. Fact this that makes the Fbi case very boring.
In 1947 a group of archeologists found a big big library, with thousands, hundreds of thousands of books in it. In the books, only names and dates: those of birth and death. From that day, England first and then America have done everything to protect the secret. It all started in the year 777 when a woman gave birth. Some kind of legend spoke of the seventh son of a seventh son, and a man had already six sons and a few daughters and still he had risked it again: a boy is born, and his father kills him immediately, then to the general surprise another boy is born, twin, and the man convinces himself that he's the eighth , but he's not. After five years the man gets scared because the boy is strange, different, apathic, and leaves it at the monastery, where one day Father Josephus realizes the boy writes names and dates everywhere: he gives him proper tools to write and is soon convinced that it's a sort of miracle, like the boy is in mission from God or something, because every name and date is correct. The monks keep him in a cell, where the boy cares only about his work, and all day every day he writes names after names, with their date of birth or death, going chronologically. All the births and deaths of a certain day, then all those of the next day, and so on, and the monks put all the sheets together and make books. When the boy is old enough to feel desire, he assaults a young maid, come with his food. The poor girl has a child, a boy who looks just like his father and who, in time, shows the same attitude and starts writing names. The monks now know how to keep the work going: they send young innocent girls to the boys that write the names, year after year, century after century, these men and women supposedly voted to the Good God up there sacrifice poor girls locking them up with their rapists, in order to have more children and continue what they believe to be a sacred mission. Disgusting, isn't it? Until one day, in the 13th century, the men and boys writing in the crypts stopped all at once, killing themselves. They had arrived at the year 2027, the end of it all, so presumably their job was over. I don't know the meaning of the scene where the young man Luke takes a page while running away, it must be for sure of the year 2027; the only thing I can imagine is what happened in that film "Knowing" where the last entry was something like EE=everybody else.
Will starts working with Nancy Lipinski and obviously they end up together. By reading a screenplay of his daughter Laura he realized the postcards are written with a character used mainly for screenplays and this puts him on the tracks of his ex-roommate Mark.
Mark works in Area 51, where the library has been moved and digitalized over the years, with the Ufo cover :-)
Mark has been providing a life-insurance company with people's date of death, but he's found out. Both his girlfriend and the company's director are killed by Area 51 security, and he asks Will for protection. He tells Will everything about the library, but in a shooting he gets shot in the head. According to the library dates he's not going to die at least until 2027 when the dates stop, so Will imagines he'll be like that for a long time.
Will searches the library for the names of the people he cares about, and is reassured that neithere him or Nancy or Laura are listed, so he knows for sure that neither of them will be killed now, so he makes a copy and hides it, then writes to his lawyer the famous letter "if you don't hear from me open this letter and follow my instructions" and then he lets the security people catch him, to talk and explain. Being the only thing they can do they set him free and he goes back home, quits drinking, retires early and starts a happy life with Nancy.
The story was a bit interesting, yes, and the detail of the Ufo-cover was fun, but the book was generally rather boring, and I confess to skipping a few pieces here and there.
I would have liked a bit of mystery, but there was none.
It was obvious there was no Doomsday killer, but it would have been better if it was a surprise.
The book goes back and forth in time, so readers must be careful about the dates to be able to understand where we are, when we are and what is happening. This is slightly annoying, but the biggest problem is the absolute lacking of mystery; we start reading about the library from the start, and it doesn't take long to see fully what it is, so Mark's big revelation "there is no Doomsday killer" has no effect at all.
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