The Quest

I have read a few other books by Nelson DeMille including Charm School, Gold Coast, Lion's Game, General's Daughter, and Night Fall, but I found this book much less satisfying. Two journalists and a photographer are in the middle of the bloody revolution Ethiopia underwent in the mid-70's. They encounter a dying priest who was held prisoner for 40 years because, he says, he saw the real Grail and and was healed by it in the Black Monastery. The three are captured and only the whim of a psychopathic Marxist general decides whether they live or die a slow and painful death. Unbelievably, after they are let go, they decide to return in search of the Grail. Two of them, the older veteran war journalist Frank Mercado, and the young female photographer Vivian Smith, his on-again-off-again lover, are true believers. Frank Purcell, the younger journalist, is skeptical, but decides to go along and help them. They are aided in eventually finding the Black Monastery by Colonel Gann, an English military adviser to the now former ruling family of Ethiopia descended from Haile Selassie. This was a rewrite of an earlier book by DeMille, and it lacks the narrative pull of later books, IMO.  However, it was, for me, an eye-opening look at the beginnings of the Civil War in Ethiopia, and also of its historical significance as a possible home of both the Ark of the Covenant and the Grail.  This was all new information for me and so satisfying on that level.