A Review By Lulu

Siberia, 1939. Pregnant with her first child, Lena Orlova plans a daring escape from a brutal Soviet prison camp to the one place she knows is safe: a cave containing the legendary Altar of Bones, hidden behind a frozen waterfall deep in the icy wilderness. San Francisco, Present Day. Zoe Dmitroff discovers that she is the last in a line of women who have been entrusted with a secret so great many have died preserving it. Propelled into a dangerous quest to discover exactly what she was born to protect, Zoe is soon running for her life from a vicious assassin and an all powerful businessman with chilling plans. Only ex-Special Ops soldier, Ry O’Malley, can help her survive, but with time running out and the web closing in, Zoe will have to make a devastating decision that will transform her forever. From the frozen wastelands of Russia, to the winding maze of Paris’s backstreets, from Washington D.C, through America’s mid-west all the way to San Francisco, THE ALTAR OF BONES is a gripping global thriller that spans the generations and unearths the dark secret behind one of the biggest conspiracies of all time.
 I really enjoyed this book for me it was a little bit of James Bond, Dan Brown, Phil Rickman and Kate Mosse rolled into one story. When I bought the book I didn’t notice the author…. I just assumed it was a female along the lines of Kate Mosse due to the picture on it’s cover. Only on reading and coming across action scene after action scene did it cross my mind whether the author was male or female (not that female authors can’t write action scenes of course).  The author’s name is Philip Carter, but then I’m told that this is a
pseudonym for an internationally renowned author who could be male or female, but I still think it’s a he, my reason being ….as much as I loved the book, there is one scene in which our heroine Zoe is being chased and throws herself into the River Seine to escape. After dragging herself out and wandering the streets of Paris freezing, she enters a cafe and orders herself a water and a salad. Oh my god, she is freezing to death and orders water and a salad, any of us would want a steaming hot drink and a beef stew. Sorry but this has to be a guy!!