The Book of Names Book

When David Shepherd was a teenager, he died after falling from a third storey roof. He was brought back with no memory of his near death experience. For the next decade and a half, David is plagued with headaches and impulses to write down lists of names. Names of people he doesn't know. Fifteen years later, a secret religious sect known as the Gnoseos are systematically killing the Hidden Ones, the thirty-six pure souls in a generation. As each Hidden One dies, another tragedy strikes in world. When David realizes everyone in his journal of names is dead or dying, he teams up with Yael HarPaz, an Israeli scholar, to stop the Gnoseos from destroying the world and to save his step-daughter, the last surviving Hidden One.

The best thing about The Book of Names is that the authors don't insult their readers by keeping up a ruse for too long. Once they reach a point where any reader can figure out who the mysterious antagonist is, they give you his full name. They don't torture their readers with eye-rolling moments throughout the rest of the book for the simple shake of a final, 'shocking' moment. For that, they've come up with something more inspired.

The science behind discovering the thirty-six Hidden Ones is an interesting concept, but it wasn't
explained thoroughly enough for me to understand exactly what they were doing. ELS (equidistant letter skips) is clear enough, but the results were often gibberish. So how did they clean up the results? What I missed most where the images. Maybe they're not common place, but I've come to really look forward to cryptograms from Dan Brown's novels. It's fun to try and solve the mystery along with the characters.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about this book is that it's based around Jewish traditions. Incorporating Adam's Book of Names, the breastplate of Aaron, and modern mystic Judaism gives the book a unique flavor.

In place of Dan Brown's Illuminati villains, there are Gnostics. From what I understand, Gnostics are Christian mystics in the same way Sufis are Muslim mystics and Kabbalists are Jewish mystics. While Kabbalists and Sufis are highly praised here, Gnostics are responsible for trying to destroy the world? I think those groups have more in common than different, and I think the book would have been better if the villains were non- or anti-mystics.