The publication date of this novel on Amazon is February 26, 2020 and in e-Book it was immediately available. Today is only two days later and I confess that I have devoured this work, its good side and its less good side, I have devoured everything in a few hours. And I have not resisted the temptation to write a review, because the things I have found may help me in my own work as a writer.

   Let's start with the least positive aspect. We are faced with writing that attracts attention for its ease. I have verified, on Amazon itself, that the previous work by this author, the only one published so far, was dated November 30, 2019. Maybe I am wrong, but I would bet that this novel has not taken its author more than three months to write. This does not mean that the quality of the prose is bad, on the contrary, syntactically and lexically it is absolutely correct. Furthermore, many passages are not content with correctness, but rise to considerable textual consistency. But it is noted that the text has been written at great speed, which gives us the measure of what it could have been if it had been prepared with more parsimony and accuracy.

   Another aspect that draws attention is what I consider to be an experimentation in relation to an element with respect to which no one has experimented with that magnitude, I am referring to the notion of author. I'm not talking about a narrator, who has been thoroughly experimented with, but rather an author. Because this is not a simple use of a pseudonym. The book is signed by Bernardo de Worms, using a particular formula, and the date is only the year 2020. Now, the narrator and protagonist is also Bernardo de Worms who, in the year 797 of our era, was 9 years old. He was therefore born in 788, according to which at the time of publishing his book he would have been a whopping 1,232 years old. This, obviously, no one believes. But of course, literature is not an exact, numerical science. Literature is essentially suggestion and there is no doubt that such an author suggests.

   Thirdly, I would like to comment on the extraordinary power and personality that the narrative voice acquires in many passages. A voice, let's say it right away, is complex, since it is the one that arises from a 9-year-old consciousness, passed through the sieve of another 1,232-year-old, or whatever. The latter often emerges warning that a certain comment should not be attributed to the young Bernardo, but to an old man, older than necessary. Thus, in passages such as the one intended to ponder the emotional effect that Gregorian chant in Latin produces on the listener, said voice becomes thick, rises, acquires potency and power, like the chant itself that threatens to burst the very vaults of the church. Also, right at the end, when the state of the bodies of the three executed is described, with marvelous economy of means, the day after the execution. Here it is clearly the old man, the ancient of days, who speaks.

   That same expressive power, in a direct style, appears when a character is given the floor in particularly dramatic circumstances, such as the moment when the abbot, exasperated by the chain of murders, vehemently apostrophizes the entire community because, of course, the murderer or murderers are mixed among that flock, which is his own.

   It is also worth clarifying that this is not a detective novel set in the medieval period, in the style of “The Name of the Rose.” There, William of Baskerville, was a 14th century Sherlock Holmes. In this work there are only attempts at the police when, for example, the abbey guard, Waldo, uses a rational method to find out who could have been the witness of the action that culminated the episode of the rat and that was also his objective. From that moment on, whether or not Waldo possesses the qualities of a good detective, there is no opportunity to know, since events will occur at such a speed that they barely give him enough time to follow them, always one movement later. Waldo is rather the “strong silent man”, the man who, through tenacity, punches given and received, ends up gaining the truth in an unhealthy or gloomy environment. That is to say, we are, squarely, in the crime novel genre.

   However, there is something more to this work. I am referring to the powerful mystical revelation it produces. We are on the path blazed by “The Da Vinci Code,” but we have been propelled much further into swampy, admittedly complicated terrain. Advancing through it could have unforeseeable consequences.

   The description of the object for which people kill in that abbey appears in the Bible, old Ramiro recites it from memory and tells us where it is found, in which book, in which chapter and in which verses. It is known that it was made to remain in the Temple of Solomon, and that when it was demolished it ended up in Rome, where it swelled the treasury of the Empire. Finally, the Visigoths, after sacking the Eternal City, brought it to Toledo. From there, faced with the Muslim threat, they had to take him north, so that he would remain in Christian territory. There are documentary traces of all this and also legends.

   That object, that work of art, but also of spirituality, seems to have the ineffable name of God engraved on it. Name of Power. The novel does not tell us what that name is, but we are given some information about the correct way to pronounce it. Even more so, in the correct way to pronounce any religious or magical text. There is the revolution.

   Now, those of us who are curious tend to always go further. If this object belongs to the Jewish tradition, specifically that of Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah, then the supreme authority is Gershom Scholem. According to this scholar, the secret and ineffable name of God is the Tetragama Y.H.V.H and the Torah, for Christians the first five books of the Old Testament, constitutes its exegesis. But tradition strictly prohibits pronouncing that name, which is why it is said to be ineffable, or perhaps because no one knows the vowels on which to support those consonants. In any case, in the novel this is not enough. Something more is needed and there is the mother of the lamb.

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