Novelist Katheen McGowan offers up an intriguing page-turner of a story that combines her real research into the Mary Magdalene history, myth and legend with a plot that is almost as breathless as a Dan Brown thriller and sure to please the growing audience of readers/seekers who want to know more about the controversies surrounding the alleged wife of Jesus and mother of his children.

This time, the story centers on a woman named Maureen who discovers she is The Expected One who is destined to bring the gospel of the Magdalene to the world. But Maureen is totally unprepared for the challenge, or for the danger she finds her life in once word gets out of her powerful and royal lineage. With the help of her cousin Peter, a Catholic priest, and a few people she learns to trust along the way, and some who betray her, Maureen sets out for the south of France to see for herself the actual places the wife of Jesus walked and lived.

Filled with historical facts amidst the exciting fiction, The Expected One follows Maureen’s own personal discovery even as she discovers the truths behind the Magdalene legend and how she is intimately linked with that legend. Though the book will automatically have readers thinking of The Da Vinci Code and the host of Templar novels that have bombarded store shelves, this is quite a treat because McGowan gives us well-rounded characters, rich description and plenty of history all interwoven together to keep us turning the pages, eager to reach the climactic ending the intensifying action and intrigue leads up to.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and especially the last few pages where the author talks about her actual research and what led her to write the book, which, by the way, is the first of three installments in the Magdalene trilogy. It’s fun trying to decipher what might be fact and what might be fiction, but in the end, you get the feeling that no matter which is which, what we have been told all along is not all it seems.