Covenant

Sloppy prose undermines British author Crawford's debut thriller about an archeological find that challenges human history. At the behest of the Defense Intelligence Agency, American combat journalist Ethan Warner agrees to travel to Israel to track down missing paleontologist Lucy Morgan. Morgan stumbled on skeletal remains of an unknown species of a human-like creature, whose larger cranial capacity and greater physical strength suggest it didn't evolve on Earth. An unscrupulous right-wing preacher, Kelvin Patterson, who's hoping to land his chosen candidate in the White House, believes that Morgan found the remains of a fallen angel. Morgan's anxious mother accompanies Warner to Israel, where they visit the scene of Morgan's excavations, improbably overseen not by the Israeli military but by a Blackwater-type military contractor. At one point Warner finds himself "pinned between third and fourth base with the ball in the air." U.S. readers will also get a chuckle out of such lines as "your chances are about as good as the Redskins at the bottom of the ninth %E2%80%98gainst the Chargers." (Oct.)