Fans of Dan Brown's wildly popular novel The Da Vinci Code, and the myriad comparable books it spawned Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's The Rule of Four, Leslie Silbert's The Intelligencer, Lev Grossman's Codex, etc. will undoubtedly enjoy Matt Bondurant's debut novel, The Third Translation. Set in modern-day London, the story follows American Egyptologist Dr. Walter Rothschild in the last days of his contract with the British Museum to solve the riddle of the Stela of Paser, a funerary stone that is one of the last remaining cryptographic puzzles of the ancient world. The hieroglyphic artifact, which supposedly holds arcane knowledge of the dead and insights into the afterlife, contains enigmatic instructions stating that the writing must be translated three different ways to unlock its secrets.

As Rothschild comes closer to solving the ancient mystery, his already miserable personal life he's divorced, his adult daughter hates him and he shares a filthy attic apartment the size of a closet with an ill-tempered researcher obsessed with spicy foods and insecticides takes a dramatic turn for the worse. After meeting a controversial writer ( the next Salman Rushdie ) at a local pub, Rothschild overindulges in alcohol and narcotics and ends up taking a strange woman back to the museum. Later, he realizes she has used him to steal an invaluable artifact. Rothschild is told to reacquire it or else. Thus begins a hallucinatory quest through London's dark underbelly that involves drug dealers, pseudo-intellectual revolutionaries, bizarre cults and a professional wrestler named Gigantica.

While just as complex as Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Bondurant's debut is a more understated, intimate kind of thriller. A compelling amalgam of history, mysticism and suspense, The Third Translation is tantalizing brain candy highly recommended for history aficionados, conspiracy theorists and closet cryptographers alike.

Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Syracuse, New York.

It is the view of every generation that they live in uncertain times, and the present era is no exception. In choosing the practice of alchemy, the science and art of transformation, as a central theme of his first novel, journalist Jon Fasman seems intent on showing us how slippery and perhaps even illusory the truths and certainty we search for may be.

Reading The Geographer's Library is like stepping into a sepia-toned daguerreotype: the past here holds all the clues. The novel's narrator is Paul Tomm, a young, sometimes painfully naive cub reporter coasting along at a weekly newspaper in a sleepy New England town. When a professor at his alma mater dies in mysterious circumstances, the reporter's research for a routine obituary leads him into an unimaginably poisonous labyrinth.

This mystery's path is littered with forged passports, ghastly murders, discarded identities and newly minted lives. The present-day narrative is interspersed with chapters telling the forgotten history of various occult objects: how they were lost, scattered and once again collected (to turn up in Connecticut), often at the cost of human lives. The purpose of this collection is nothing less than the ultimate goal of alchemy: to discover the secret of life.

The story spans nine centuries and several continents, returning again and again to the vast expanses of Central Asia and the turbulence left in the wake of the crumbled Soviet Union. The geographer of the title was banished from none other than Baghdad, and the novel's visits to places currently in the public eye add to its intrigue. Ultimately, although the novel does not follow Paul's growth into the next stage of his life, we are left with the thought that it is the process of transformation itself that counts.

Jehanne Moharram grew up in the Middle East and now writes from Virginia.

How would you feel if you found out the CIA wanted you dead? Anxious, to say the least. That's the situation facing Joel Backman, the character at the heart of John Grisham's latest novel, The Broker. Once again, Grisham delivers a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that's all the more gripping because it feels eerily close to real-life events.

Backman, a well-known Washington power broker, is doing time in a federal prison when the president unexpectedly grants him a last-minute pardon before leaving office (an act that may bring to mind the pardon of financier Marc Rich on Bill Clinton's final day as president). As it turns out, the pardon isn't entirely good news for Backman, who is deposited in Italy with a new name and a new identity. It seems that Backman has secret information about a satellite surveillance system, and a foreign government wants to kill him to keep the secret from getting out. The CIA plans to leak word of his new identity to the Israelis, the Russians, the Chinese and the Saudis then wait to see who kills him.

Readers the world over can't get enough of Grisham, who now has more than 60 million books in print. The Jan. 11 release of The Broker marks the 15th consecutive year that Grisham has published at least one book a year, and all have been bestsellers. This remarkable string of publishing hits started in 1991 with his breakout legal thriller, The Firm, and has continued with a dozen more suspense novels and occasional detours into other genres (Skipping Christmas, The Painted House).

In a rare interview, Grisham recently told The Hook, a newspaper in his adopted hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, that he planned to continue turning out legal thrillers for at least the next five years. "I can't write romance or sci-fi or horror stories. [But] when you write about lawyers and the law, the material is endless, "Grisham said. As long as legal thrillers are popular, I'll keep writing 'em.