Malta as Ground Zero

Noel Grima, editor of the Malta Independent on Sunday, reviews Raymond John's Malta based thriller - The Cellini Masterpiece:

Malta as the Ground Zero of the Mediterranean. Fanciful? In this day of international terrorism nothing is too fanciful or impossible at all. The Cellini Masterpiece is the title of a new thriller by Raymond John. As should be done with all good thrillers, any undue revelation of details or conclusions will mar the excitement of reading it. But a Maltese reviewer can be pardoned for noticing the details: in this international intrigue there is international terrorism focused on Malta, but there is also a convoluted political scene with the prime minister, Antony Farrugia, who is taken as hostage by the terrorists, the head of the armed forces, Brigadier Borg-Olivier, Cardinal Vella the Bishop of Malta, and scheming nobleman Lorenzo Cornacchia who lives in Borgiswed Palace in Mdina with dungeons and secret passages leading outside the bastions.

There is more, but only this much can be said. Come November a huge part of Mr John’s finale will come alive, hopefully with equally positive outcomes.Raymond John is a historian and a dealer in collectibles. As a retired military intelligence specialist, he is familiar with the strategies and weapons used in the story. His life-long love for Malta grew from a childhood stamp collection and led to research, visits and friendships with many Maltese both in America and in Malta. This has paid off handsomely in the book. The early chapters show a keen ear and eye for what is very normal for us Maltese but completely strange and foreign for foreigners here: the atmosphere in the sleazy one star hotel in Sliema and the strange life specimens that inhabit the environs. Fortunately for the book’s hero, Rick Olsen, and for us Maltese, however, the taxi drivers are not portrayed in a bad light, even if a girl taxi driver (an impossibility in Malta) is the heroine. At the other end of the spectrum, Arabs are everywhere in Malta and no one really knows what they are doing, the book seems to say.

'Enter the streets of Malta with this free chapter of the book'.

Sharon Wheeler says that The Cellini Masterpiece 'binds together art, history and international affairs - and the denouement is reached through intelligence from nearly 600 years ago and from today's cyber age'