Here are some customer reviews of
Labyrinth
: I have just finished this book and I can honestly say I really grew to like the characters and was left wanting to know what happens to them next. The historical facts appear to be accurate and are combined with the fiction in an interesting and exciting narrative. Although in some parts the editing was a bit off, mostly it is superbly written and the 2nd half really picks up the pace. Readers who are comparing this to the Da Vinci code are missing the point - this is an enchanting and intelligent story of love and loss, better compared to something like Dante's Last March than a fictional thriller.
I bought this book because I am hooked on grail legends. I loved the Da Vinci Code and I thought this would be somewhat like it. It's not and actually that was ok. Although it was a little slow at first it definitely picked up once you are about a third into it and overall I thought it was a very good read. Although it's not non-stop action like DVC, I thought it was a story that was very well told. I do have one small compaint, though... there is dialogue between the charcters in French that are not translated into English. I don't speak French so I was at a loss as to what the charcters were saying. Nonetheless, I would still definitely recommend it.
 Like The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, Mosse brings to life geography and history combined. In Mosse's case, it is a small French region, the Languedoc, in the beginning of the thirteenth century. Mosse's love of place and time is obvious in the accuracy of detail and the way she's woven the lives of her characters into real history.
Like Kostova's story, it's just about the only thing there is to recommend this novel. The writing is surprisingly pedestrian and stale for someone so intimately involved with the writen word. Her characters, especially her two female protagonists, are mere sketches, with fuzzy outlines. Their motivations are often left unexplained, creating confusion. The crux of the story, the search for the Grail, is a series of dead-ends that eventually lead us to where we started, but without the sense of inevitability a story such as this should have. In fact, the ending remined me of an Indiana Jones-type story, down to the opening chasm and the loss of the Grail.
The story is basic: two parallel lives, one in 1209, one in 2005, with "memories" linking them. Alice, as a volunteer archeologist, unearths a cave with two skeletons and a labyrinth, which begins a series of events where one faction wants to find the Grail for the power and immortality it will give, while the other, a staunch Catholic, wants to destroy it. Woven through it are the lives of the original Alais and her family during the Crusade against the French. The life of Alais will impel Alice to stumble through until the supposedly climax of the story. Unfortunately, the climax is so clichıd, it is easy to guess it several hundred pages before the end.
To cap it all off, the writing is riddled with typos and contradictions, evidence that the manuscript was given only a cursory edit. (For instance, Alice says that her parents died in 1993 then, barely five pages later, she says they died in 1982.) There are words missing, and spelling mistakes that could have been caught with a simple spellcheck. This proves to me, once again, that publishing houses have become simply clearinghouses.
Unless you are interested in the Cathars and 13th Century history, I'd bypass this book.
 I was hugely disappointed.
Probably the most overhyped author around at the present time.
This novel can only be described as 'average' at best.
Unless you are looking for sub-standard Dan Brown cliched writing this is one to avoid.
 It's a rare thing in publishing history for an author to take a geographical location and reinvent it for the pure pleasure of the reader, and that is what Kate Mosse has done for South West France. The heat comes off every page of this extraordinary tale set both in ancient Carcassone and present day France, and will no doubt have airlines rescheduling to meet the likely reader demand to see for themselves where these wonderfully imagined events are set. If you like split-time stories with gripping mysteries and strong female protagonists this book will be your read of the year. Unforgettable.
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