Finished
Jan Wallentin's
Strindberg's Star, a presumably standalone historical artifact-chasing secret society conspiracy thriller in the vein of
The Da Vinci Code, of which I'm starting to think these things are contractually obligated to have some kind of in-story tie to the Knights Templar and their purported heirs (or the Cathars, if the author is feeling like a tradition-defying Gnostic rebel) and/or the Nazi occult department and its immediate precursors.
This was one of the latter, and with a decent reason to link them up, given the Nazi pre-occupation with ancient Norse stuff, and the story starting in Sweden and starring a Swedish Jewish character who has the obligatory dysfunctional academic backstory of being a barely-functioning pharmaceutical-addicted researcher obsessed with the rise and use of ancient religious symbols to Nazi symbology thanks to the generationally passed-on trauma of his Holocaust-survivor refugee grandmother, who rather amusingly uses ploys to avoid the tiresome New Age university students his chosen field has attracted.
Alas, the rest of the book is not nearly as entertaining as that would suggest, although it does start off interestingly with the strange find of an unusually well-preserved body and some cryptic messages. And the problems posed by these are actually pretty engaging while the mystery aspect of figuring out what they mean and how they connect is going on.
But once it gets to the point where they've located the MacGuffin and the chase is reallly on, it turns into a boringly standard action thriller where I admit the author did spend some time setting up hints for many of the twists in advance so that the means of capture/escape aren't quite out of the blue, even if a little improbable. (And I don't really get the impression that the genius hacker helper sister actually is such, since there are a couple of supposedly important details mentioned which would seem to indicate a certain amount of ignorance as to how computer servers and backups actually work, though it's not nearly as egregious as, say, believing that standard ideographic East Asian languages' written text passages are actually a decipherable code.)
That said, the author (who is apparently a journalist for whom this was an internationally best-selling debut novel) did make interesting use of actual Swedish history and other nations' cultural references in this and tied those together in a reasonably plausible way. (And entertainingly lampooned his own profession with the cynical rush to feed the news cycle with sensationalist headlines; fact-checking optional.)
A fair amount of the stuff that I thought for sure he'd had to have made up for the story turned out to be real. Swedish explorer guy stumbles across ancient artifacts in a millenia-buried city of a lost civilization's kingdom exposed by a freak sandstorm? Minus the particular artifacts, actually seems to have happened that way (
Wikipedia). Austrian occult dude is the secret society's stealth infiltration agent who presents himself as the scion of a 238,000 year old heroic bloodline dating back from the days when there were three suns and a whole bunch of dwarves and dragons gets
carte blanche to completely redecorate a German castle with mystic symbolism before being ousted by Himmler? That one happened, too (
Wikipedia), probably minus the secret society, although you never know when it comes to that. And so forth. Truth really is stranger than fiction, sometimes.
Actually, probably the most intriguing bits of this novel were the supposed connections between the historical things going on and the purported cover-ups related to them, not the actual artifact chase and resolution, which was IMHO not particularly well-explained when it came to the apparent very important paranormal elements surrounding them and the eventual rather pat solution to the hero's increasingly complicated situation. Tell me less about your mysterious star and more about the feud between Sven Hedin and August Strindberg*, plz. (I suspect I am reading the wrong genre for this, though.)
Overall, an okay novel for its subsubgenre that I personally would have found considerably more compelling if it had focused on something else entirely, but I did get introduced to some cool-sounding historical figures and events by it, and the apparent preservative effects of copper vitriol and the spelunking practices of hobbyist cave-divers, so I'm going to count it as having been worth the time to read.
* Who, I should probably note, is not the eponymous Strindberg of the titular star, who happens instead to be his cousin Nils, who died tragically in an early Arctic exploration attempt which reads like a how-not-to checklist of Arctic expedition-going, even before one accounts for conspiracy theory cover-up murders.
Wikipedia says he was probably dead from polar bear.