Sacred Mount Sinai or SHaRa

Learning from Ancient Greece, Jerusalem, Jordan, Petra & Sinai about MoShe and Sacred HSpirituality, Power of Mind, Mindfulness, Mantras, Poetry, consciousness, meditation

 

by Natasa Pantović Nuit

When travelling through Greece this summer, I've visited Mount Olympus, once considered as the home of the Greek Gods of the Hellenistic World. In classical mythology, it is Mount Athos in Greece where the Thracian giant battled Poseidon, god of the Sea. Check Ancient Temples and Fire Stolen from Gods.

 

 

Greek NF MG 32, a palimpsest manuscript from the New Finds, St. Catherine's Monastery of the Sinai, Egypt

Still considered very sacred, this area today hosts Christian Orthodox Monasteries and the Greek Sacred Mount called Hilandar, run by Serbian and Greek monks, hosting Orthodox Christian Monks from all over the world, accessable only to the male spiritual seakers. The God Vibration

 

Disappearance at Mount Sinai - Jim Musgr... In 1866 Detective, and Civil War veteran, Pat O'Malley's returns to the Five Points neighborhood of New York City to investigate the biggest case of his career. O’Malley is hired to search for Dr. Arthur Mergenthaler, a wealthy Jewish inventor and entrepreneur, after he goes missing from a protected wing of Mount Sinai hospital but after a hidden passage is discovered and another body turns up O’Malley begins to understand this case runs far deeper than he had imagined. Surrounded by a culture of anti-Semitism and racism, O’Malley disguises himself as an Oxford England Professor to infiltrate the anti-Semite’s group and return to the deep South to solve the case and locate the missing doctor.

Disappearance at Mount Sinai is the second Pat O’Malley mystery by Jim Musgrave but it is easily read as a stand-alone book. Set in post-Civil War America during a time of rampant racism and anti-Semitism the Irish Detective O’Malley from the Five Points neighborhood is hired to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy Jewish doctor. Musgrave captures the intense conflict of faith, race and prejudice from this era in American history almost immediately and it never lets go. The underlying current of prejudice and hate is what makes this story so intoxicating.

There is little to criticize about Disappearance at Mount Sinai and Musgrave’s talent shined with this mystery novel. The characters were delightful despite being flawed and hateful. I especially enjoyed the conflict between Pat O’Malley and his father. Detective Pat O’Malley is everything his father is not. He is sober and tolerant of various races and cultures whereas his father owns and operates bar in a rough Irish neighborhood in Five Points all the while hating anyone who is different than his own Irish folks. Their strained and yet deeply involved relationship was one of my favorite character highlights of the book. When you add Rebecca Charming, Shannon O’Hare, the Mergenthaler family and the anti-Semite group the cast becomes colorful and beyond fascinating. Disappearance at Mount Sinai does occasionally reference previous character interaction from Musgrave’s first O’Malley mystery but it only serves to provide a glimpse at history, there are never any gaps in story because this is the second in a series.

With every turn of the page this mystery became more complex and more intense. As would be expected, O’Malley originally questions the hospital staff and the immediate family about the disappearance of Dr. Mergenthaler. A few interviews and a couple of visits later O’Malley understands that this mystery goes well beyond this simple family. This case will prove to require all of O’Malley’s detective skills as he goes undercover to pursue an investigation against the military and top-ranking politicians and officials. Every page is thrilling and curious as the complexity of the case grows and threatens to spin out of control.

Jim Musgrave is an award-winning author and it’s easy to see why. The characters are well-developed and feel authentic, he captures the essence of America’s reconstructive era perfectly and the pace of the story is steady. The mystery is complex and dramatic without being far-fetched or cliché. Musgrave even nailed the dialogue and interactions between such strongly divided cultures. The conclusion, just like the rest of the book, does not disappoint. Disappearance at Mount Sinai is absolutely a mystery worth reading.

Review by Ashley LaMar
Closed the Cover</a)

Sinai - William Smethurst Are you a connoisseur of Egyptology? I can't really say that I am, though I do enjoy trivial bits of information about the area, the people that lived there, mythology, weapons, and artwork. My dad went on a tour of Egypt and came back with pictures and presents for everyone, and he piqued my curiosity. I also enjoy the occasional historical thriller. When the publisher invited me to read and review this book, I found the description intriguing. It sounded like it could be a sort of Egyptian "Da Vinci Code."

Not even close. This book falls into the "DNF" (Did Not Finish) category, and I will tell you why:

The publisher, December House, wrote "Sinai was originally released in 1996 but has been rewritten and updated for it's e-book release..." The book got off to a rough (slow and confusing) start, but sometimes first chapters are like that, and I forged onward. The very first page—I was reading this on my Kindle—is mostly one sentence, but with a couple of educational bits thrown in in parentheses. And just in case you missed the second sentence on the page, it is repeated in the beginning of the second paragraph. The author seems pretty fond of this tactic.

Mr. Smethurst is also an ardent devotee of passive voice, which means that the trifling amount of action included in what I read came watered down and at a distance from the reader. In Chapter 12 things got exciting when bullets started flying, but the thrill only lasted for one paragraph. One measly paragraph! Then, suddenly, "He was in Cairo."

I wanted to scream. "What? Wait! Where's the heart-stopping terror? The sound of gunfire? Shouting? Screaming? Anything? I'll take a quiet cold sweat, please." And let's not forget that pernicious "was" that completely killed any lingering hope of excitement.

An accomplice gave the appearance of getting chased through the city and up a pyramid, but it was only an appearance. Nothing really happened. At least not within the reader's view.

Along with the re-writing there should have been some re-editing. The book is decorated with punctuation errors, filter words (that passive voice thing!), several typos, out-of-place abbreviations, repetitious phrases, awkward passages (generally involving conversations), jerky transitions, and a heavy sprinkling of names that perhaps a student of the field would appreciate, but the author does not attach any emotional weight for the more casual reader's benefit. I wanted to like this book. I kept looking for something to like...

At 23%, I checked the progress bar to see how much further I had to go.

At 37% I started avoiding my Kindle and turned to washing dishes, doing laundry, paying bills, attempting to rescue information from my jiggered laptop...

Wait a minute, I like to read! How about if I just read something else instead?

I managed to find the first volume of Whittemore's "Jerusalem Quartet" at our local public library. True to form, it has the same weird touch that characterized his first novel (Quin's Shanghai Circus), but lingers more on each of its characters. Whittemore is writing for the long haul, and what may look like a singular book on the surface is obviously only part of the whole. This, I think, is my problem with it. I was so amazed by Quin's Shanghai Circus, that I expected more of the same here. The ingredients are the same; the cake tastes different.

This volume introduces the characters, including: Skanderberg Wallenstein, who discovers the original Bible and a disturbing secret about it, and so decides to write his own; Haj Harun, antiquities dealer who has been alive for over three-thousand years, and sometimes having trouble keeping his centuries straight; O'Sullivan Beare, the umptiumpth son of a poor Irish fisherman, caught up in another war in the Middle East; and Stern, son of Strongbow, who feels it is his destiny to try to build a new world in a land that fiercely resists anything but tradition. Whittemore's trademark method of interweaving the background of his characters while continuing an overall plot puts all these characters in touch with each other, sometimes working together, sometimes at ends.

The details and some sections here are as good as anything I've ever read, but the novel didn't congeal for me, and I was disappointed. Maybe I had expected too much. I'll still finish off the series, as I find the books, but unless the succeeding books somehow cast new light on the first volume, this one was a wash for me.