THE LAST PROPHECY

Land's series seems to gain momentum with every installment, and his latest is as timely and extravagantly plotted as ever. In their seventh adventure, dynamic law enforcement duo and lovers Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea are dispatched by their new employer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, to investigate a massacre in the Palestinian village of Bureij. Ben, a rugged Palestinian-American detective, and Danielle, a beautiful former Israeli police inspector, soon discover that the massacre has little to do with current tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, the attack is rooted in a discovery made by Allied soldiers in 1945. The mysterious cache of steel canisters uncovered under stacks of corpses at Buchenwald pulses beneath the present-day action like a ticking time bomb. Everyone who has come into contact with the canisters in the half-century since their discovery has wound up dead, and a Nostradamus prophecy of universal destruction adds another layer of menace to the tale. Ben and Danielle's investigation leads them into conflict with renegades all over the globe, including the last vestiges of the Iraqi Special Republican Guard and a network of rogue ex-Soviet moles. Land's prose can be a little overheated, but the breakneck pace and chockablock plotting leave protagonists (and the civilized world) constantly teetering on the brink of destruction. Highly entertaining from start to finish, this is prime escapist fiction, implausible yet riveting. (Apr.)