No Indiana Jones is present in THE CRYSTAL SKULL, but Manda Scott’s novel still has plenty of archaeology-oriented adventure. The hero here is a heroine: Stella, the scholar who’s freshly married to Kit, a Bede’s scholar who’s obsessed with finding the blue-glowing titular object – his holy grail of ancient artifacts.

After much blood, sweat and tears, Kit has located the secret cave of Cedric Owen, the 16th-century physician to whom the skull once belonged, so the newlyweds are busy spelunking as the book begins. They find the skull almost immediately, but something finds them, too.

Kit falls into a pit and nearly dies, but Stella escapes scot-free. With him confined to a wheelchair during recovery, they crack codes and learn more about the skull, which can prevent Armageddon, according to Nostradamus.

That famed soothsayer is a character when the novel shifts back to mid-1550s, and Owen becomes the owner of the skull, one of a rumored 13. He learns – the hard way, as it turns out – that it’s been passed down for generations, and that people are out there willing to kill for it.

So Scott has two narratives of pursuit running concurrently, yet only one of them – the modern-day version – held any interest with me. Owen’s was just too steeped in historical mumbo-jumbo for my tastes, and I’m usually a sucker for thrillers with coded messages and maps.

This one has all that, wrapped in a timely prophecy that suggests the world will end in 2012 if all 13 skulls aren’t reunited. That’s a setup that should play like gangbusters, but Scott approaches it a bit stuffily. She’s a good writer – almost too good to allow herself to let her hair down and really have fun with the concept.

My main problem is that as soon I had the bad guy pegged from the first time he bursts on the scene and utters sentence one, so the “reveal” was anticlimactic as can be. THE CRYSTAL SKULL isn’t bad, but its true potential is untapped. –Rod Lott

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