After three cloyed years of Dan Br...

After three cloyed years of Dan Brown overload, a scarcely any months back I swore I'd not at any time again voluntarily type the words MARY MAGDALENE.

Not on the same level if Jesus (a k a Mr Magdalene) appeared to me himself and begged me to give the antique gal another chance.

yet this was just too pious for my inner cynic to resist.

The calculate uponed One, which is billed as fiction (more or less) is strong to be the talk of the town in the days and weeks to arise

At least, that appears to be the evil plan.

Released Tuesday, the novel, written according to Kathleen McGowan and published from Touchstone Fireside (an imprint of publishing giant Simon & Schuster) is another in a protracted line of Mary-Magdalene-And- Jesus-Were-Friends-With-Benefits volumes in the tradition of Brown's The Da Vinci collection of laws

moreover unlike the hundreds of other Mary Magdalene parts already on the market, McGowan has dreamed up a practically fail-safe marketing grasshook one-upping the master himself.

While Brown vehemently hints that his novel about Jesus' relationship with Magdalene is more fact than fiction, McGowan claims to be an actual descendant of the alleged spiritual couple.

"I don't want population to think I'm claiming to be about elitist figure in the (Jesus) bloodline," McGowan told the London Sunday Times last week. "What I'm saying is that Mary and Jesus had children, and after 2000 years of procreation there are probably millions of descendants around the world. I believe I'm one"

Sweet fancy Mose it's brilliant! on what account didn't I think of that?

STORY HAS A MYSTERIOUS RING

McGowan says her novel is the arise of her 20 years of research about Mary Magdalene and claims to have never-before revealed "source material."

"Those guarding the tradition of Mary Magdalene render free of accessed their doors to her because of her connections to an ancient French family that traces its primitive words to Mary Magdalene, her birth date, and her possession of a special ring," the book's publicity material reads.

McGowan's author photo forward the book's dust jacket point out tos her wearing the ring in question.

In the novel, the protagonist, Maureen Pascal, acquires the ring subordinate to mysterious circumstances from a Jerusalem antiquities dealer, setting in motion her action with the keepers of the "truth" about the Magdalene and the discovery of her familial connections to the alleged pure couple.

While The look fored One is fiction, it's largely autobiographical, the author says. (Kind of like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces in reverse)

McGowan can't "prove" her story because, she says, she has to shelter her sources from unidentified ones who would want to suppres perhaps between the sides of violent means, the "greatest story not told."

unhurts FAMILIAR, RIGHT?

on the contrary lest she be called a model cat, McGowan and her Touchstone editor, Trish Todd, are quick to point disclosed that the author began working forward her manuscript years before Brown published his digest

"You've got to give her credit, it's a surpassingly creative approach," said Lynn Garrett, religion editor for Publisher's Weekly, the Bible of the work world. "The whole thing undecayeds just like a massive marketing ploy yet in publishing, nothing succeeds like succes and if you have a main division like The Da Vinci digest there's going to be tons of imitators, and she's just lay a creative twist on it."

Publisher's Weekly gave The rely uponed One a lukewarm review.

McGowan is no Flannery O'Connor. on the contrary then again, Brown is no Dostoyevsky, and he still managed to betray 60 million copies of Da Vinci.

McGowan self-published her novel last year, selling about 2500 copies before Touchstone bought it and brace sequels for a staggering seven-figure advance. "It doesn't happen highly often, when you start reading something and you just know it'll be vast and your hands start to tremble" Todd said. "The clasp was there, but if the volume hadn't delivered the hook would have been meaningless."

Touchstone has sunk another $200000 into marketing the novel.

"If you can't have a convenient book, you can at least have a great marketing plan," Garrett said.

What's nearest in the increasingly Machiavellian world of part marketing? An author who claims to be Jesus Christ, perhaps?

The other Coming: He's back and he's written a tell-all main division Inside the hidden life of the savior, yours for $2495 in hardback.

"I will not apologize for the fact that I have oppos accepted scholarly practices in telling this story," McGowan says of her novel. "It is, in fact, irresponsible to accept what was written down."

Her readers might want to retain that in mind.

e-mail: cfalsani@suntimes.com

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