The Third Translation.

THE THIRD TRANSLATION. Matt Bondurant. 2005. Read by Nick Sullivan. 11 cds. 13.25 hrs. BBC America Audio, Sound Library. 0-7927-3560-9. $99.95. Vinyl; plot, author, reader notes. SA

Bondurant's first novel, a literary suspense thriller, is a treat for anyone interested in ancient Egypt and the translating of undecoded written antiquities. Walter Rothschild, an American Egyptologist and cryptographer, once abandoned his wife and young daughter to pursue his desire to solve such riddles. As the tale opens, he is a middle-aged expert working on a commission for the British Museum, a last-resort hire brought aboard to crack the code on the mysterious, and actual, Stela of Paser, a funerary stone. His much younger, hard-drinking and hard-drugging colleagues put Walter in the way of some curious people, and he soon is the unexpected pawn of a mysterious cult that requires his services for their own ends. While comparisons with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code are inevitable, they are not particularly useful. This is not, strictly speaking, an action novel.

Bondurant is a talented writer whose meticulous attention to detail, philosophical musings, and flights of lyricism make the novel's message far more important than the Stela's. Sullivan gives Bondurant's characters distinct voices and has a large arsenal of credible foreign accents. Francine Levitov, Attorney, New York, NY