Henry Lincoln has written about the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau before, and he has produced British TV specials that have been well received. His new book was to be a further investigation into that same mystery, seeing if there's still gold in that vein (and judging by all of the seriously bad books published every year on the subject, that is still plenty).
The first couple of chapters rehash the well known story of Sauniere, the two coded parchments, the tombstones and Poussin's Shepherds of Arcadia, all of which appear in every book at least feigning research into Rennes. I found the decoding work to be interesting and fairly convincing. I am no cryptologist but it seemed to make sense. That takes up to page 65.
From there, Lincoln takes a detour from which he never returns. His application of some of the 'sacred geometry' used to decode the parchments, to the geography around the villages in the French countryside surrounding Rennes, taking a cue from other books Lincoln himself disparages as truly self-delusional in nature, leads him into a maze of relationships in geographical features and distances. For the rest of the book these are layered one upon another until they seem to overwhelm the ability to make sense of any of it, and Lincoln abandons the idea, suggesting that other researchers pick up the load at that point and make something of it. No doubt someone will, and no doubt it will be published, but I seriously doubt further real insight will result.
I think that Lincoln is far from the worst researcher working on this subject, and I also feel that he is a good writer with both a sense of humor and a sense of judgement and proportion. His comments on some of the other books touching on his subject show a healthy dose of skepticism. How sad, then, that he allows his own book to be hijacked by the cartographical puzzle/temple idea. I am not saying that the distance relationships do not exist: Lincoln is very good about backing up his data with the proper maps and throws all of his research open to confirmation by the reader, which is frankly very refreshing. But it seems most likely that we are looking at a great deal of coincidence and happenstance. Lincoln cannot answer WHO or WHY to any of it, and does not really try to.
The book is not a total waste, and I cannot disprove Lincoln's research, nor would I want to. But the book is basically incomplete in that Lincoln lets his own train of thought go off into left field a third of the way through, and then leaves the reader holding a bunch of data of unknown validity or import.
