We join our hero a year after our last adventure where his memory was altered and his wife had passed. Indy is looking for something to get out of teaching Celtic Archeology & the dean is looking to rid the university of him.

His trip to his al ma matter in the University of Chicago doesn't quite go as planned, it seems his juvenille hijinks from the first book in the series are still haunting him. He's able to hook up with his old college roommate, Jack Shannon, who's Jazz club is off-the-charts these days, but Al Capone is not down with dat.

The book felt like MacGregor had recently been born-again during his authoring of the series. While biblical adjacent stories are not new to the franchise, look at "Raiders of the Lost Arc", this has a lot of very baby Christian references far beyond the academic fiction of Raiders. Shannon himself has recently been born-again but sees little issue of him committing to his crime-family and his Pentecostal church. He is infatuated by a young woman whose dad comes to speak at his church regarding Noah's Ark.

Indy too likes the new girl, which is the primary reason he agrees to go with her dad on the quest to re-locate Noah's Ark. Dr. Vladimir Zobolonksy for religious/political reasons, Indy for personal/academic. Some Russian communists, and Islamic Fascists try to stop their journey along the way because...why not?

The story kept the plot moving as an Indian Jones film. This is the first book in the series I felt actually would have been better as a movie, mostly because the characters are frequently speaking different languages, which would be much clearer on TV with English Subtitles than reading it all in English and only getting hints on code-switching. Otherwise, MacGregor does a fine job, he is great at making large jumps in time of the plot make sense and feel normal.

The biggest reason "Genesis Deluge" does reach my 5 star is two of the tertiary characters have close loved ones die, yet their mourning is complete in a sentence or two. While MacGregor tries to cover this with the characters' own lives being in such peril that they have to move on quickly, it doesn't feel realistic nor emotionally intelligent. ( )

There is not much to recommend about Indiana Jones and the Genesis Deluge. Jones did not feel at all like the film character; he had a whip and a fedora, and spouted archeological facts, but other than that he was fairly generic. Supporting characters were similarly one-dimensional. One character has his family murdered while he watched and one page later there was no noticeable effect on his behavior, he went on as if nothing had happened and was thinking about chasing a girl. The action was so-so, the settings quite drab, and the ending anticlimactic.

So after an enjoyable first two books by Rob MacGregor, the next two (this one and the Seven Veils) were very disappointing. Their saving grace, if you want to consider it such, is that they are really quick reads. I finished the Genesis Deluge even though it was not good because it was only an extra couple of hours of reading to do so. ( )